o men
change names and places--and the deed is done! Where are the
obstacles? Remove my Lord (by fair means or foul) from his room; and
keep him secretly prisoner in the palace, to live or die as future
necessity may determine. Place the Courier in the vacant bed, and call
in the doctor to see him--ill, in my Lord's character, and (if he dies)
dying under my Lord's name!'

The manuscript dropped from Henry's hands. A sickening sense of horror
overpowered him. The question which had occurred to his mind at the
close of the First Act of the Play assumed a new and terrible interest
now. As far as the scene of the Countess's soliloquy, the incidents of
the Second Act had reflected the events of his late brother's life as
faithfully as the incidents of the First Act. Was the monstrous plot,
revealed in the lines which he had just read, the offspring of the
Countess's morbid imagination? or had she, in this case also, deluded
herself with the idea that she was inventing when she was really
writing under the influence of her own guilty remembrances of the past?
If the latter interpretation were the true one, he had just read the
narrative of the contemplated murder of his brother, planned in cold
blood by a woman who was at that moment inhabiting the same house with
him. While, to make the fatality complete, Agnes herself had
innocently provided the conspirators with the one man who was fitted to
be the passive agent of their crime.

Even the bare doubt that it might be so was more than he could endure.
He left his room; resolved to force the truth out of the Countess, or
to denounce her before the authorities as a murderess at large.

Arrived at her door, he was met by a person just leaving the room. The
person was the manager. He was hardly recognisable; he looked and
spoke like a man in a state of desperation.

'Oh, go in, if you like!' he said to Henry. 'Mark this, sir! I am not
a superstitious man; but I do begin to believe that crimes carry their
own curse with them. This hotel is under a curse. What happens in the
morning? We discover a crime committed in the old days of the palace.
The night comes, and brings another dreadful event with it--a death; a
sudden and shocking death, in the house. Go in, and see for yourself!
I shall resign my situation, Mr. Westwick: I can't contend with the
fatalities that pursue me here!'

Henry entered the room.

The Countess was stretched on her bed. The doctor on one side, a