Charles immediately obeyed the summons, and the coroner, after a short pause, during which he seemed embarrassed by painful emotions, and feelings for the young man himself, he said: "I grieve very much, Sir Charles, to have to call you at all upon this painful business, and still more to have to caution you that there are circumstances connected with your conduct during yesterday, which may prove of such very great importance to yourself at an after period, that it will be well for you to weigh every word, and not to speak anything the tendency of which you have not fully considered." The young gentleman merely bowed his head, and the coroner then asked him to go on, and to detail as much as he thought fit of the events which occurred to himself during the preceding day. Charles replied at once: "Were it independent, sir, of the death of my father, that day would be, from various other events, the most painful of my life. On the morning of that day, which I had appointed for shooting, my mother explained to me the particulars of a discussion of a most unhappy kind, which had taken place between herself and my father, and which had ended in an agreement to separate for ever. Illness had prevented her previously from executing her resolution, but she deputed me to inform my father that that resolution was unchanged and to arrange with him the necessary preliminaries. "I mention these painful facts to account for the serious dispute which ensued between my father and myself upon the subject. His conduct and his language became so violent, that feeling my own temper every moment giving way, I left him, and went out into the park. As I had intended to shoot, everything had been prepared for that purpose, and I took my gun from the hands of the servant quite unconsciously. The keepers were waiting without with the dogs, but feeling that I was in no state to enjoy such an amusement, I told them I should not want them, and walked on. I still had the gun in my hand, and kept it till I reached the door of the garden, when finding that it put me to inconvenience, I leaned it against the wall under the tool shed, and walked on, intending to take it up as I came back again. I forgot it, however, entirely, and returned to the house without it, nor thought of it more till I heard that it had been found near the dead body of my unhappy father. That father I never saw again from the time I left him in the library, at about half past eleven o'clock, till the time he was brought home a corpse. This, I believe, is all that I have to state. But any question which may be asked me I am very willing to answer, provided it affects myself alone." "In the first place, then," asked the coroner, "will you permit me to inquire if there is any one on whom your own suspicions fix as the perpetrator of this horrid act?"