He had determined to marry Miss Reay if she would accept him, and one of the last letters of the correspondence above quoted proves that the marriage arrangements were all but completed. On the 1st March, 1779, he writes: "In a month or six weeks at farthest from this time I might certainly call you mine. Only remember that my character now I have taken orders renders exhibition necessary. By to-night's post I shall write into Norfolk about the alterations at _our_ parsonage." But within a few weeks a cloud overshadowed his life. It is only vaguely indicated in a letter to a friend, dated the 20th March, in which he hints at a rupture between Miss Reay and himself. "What I shall do I know not—without her I do not think I can exist." A few days later he wrote to the same friend: "Despair goads me on—death only can relieve me. . . . What then have I to do, who only lived when she loved me, but cease to live now she ceases to love?" At this period it is evident that the idea of suicide only occupied his overwrought brain. He wrote on the 7th April: "When this reaches you I shall be no more. . . . You know where my affections were placed; my having by some means or other lost hers (an idea which I could not support) has driven me to madness." So far he does not appear to have contemplated any violence against Miss Reay, for in his letter he commends her to the kind offices of his friend. He spent that day in self-communing and in reading a volume of Doctor Blair's sermons. In the evening he went from his lodgings in Duke's Court, St. Martin's Lane, towards the Admiralty, and saw Miss Reay drive by to the Covent Garden Theatre. He followed her into the theatre and gazed at her for the last time. Then, unable to restrain the violence of his passion, he returned to his lodgings, and having loaded two pistols, returned to Covent Garden, where he waited in the piazza till the play was over. When Miss Reay came out he stepped up with a pistol in each hand. One he fired at her, and killed her on the spot; the other he discharged at himself, but without fatal effect. He was at once arrested, and when his wound had been dressed, was committed by Sir John Fielding to Tothill Fields, and afterwards to Newgate. He wrote from prison to the same friend as follows: "I am alive——and she is dead. I shot her, shot her, and not myself. Some of her blood and brains is still upon my clothes. I don't ask you to speak to me, I don't ask you to look at me, only come hither and bring me a little poison, such as is strong enough. Upon my knees I beg, if your friendship for me ever was sincere, do, _do_ bring me some poison."