endeavouring to render assistance to Willoughby, confused notions were floating through his mind of the dreadful addition, that in case of the worst, it would be to his poor mother's grief to know that Willoughby had committed the awful crime of putting a period to his own existence; and mingled with these, were thoughts still more disjointed of Christian rites refused to persons guilty of suicide: so that altogether Alfred was actuated, without any power of defining his motives, by a vague sense, that some sort of necessity existed for suppressing the proofs of his brother having wilfully taken the _poison_. He was of course quite incapable at such a moment of a process of reasoning by which to decide what other supposition it would be either probable or desirable should be formed. Messengers had been despatched in every direction; yet before any medical man arrived, the convulsions had subsided, and death, accompanied by the most ghastly appearances, taken place. At length the bustle of an arrival was heard; instead, however, of the expected doctor, Geoffery Arden entered the room. CHAPTER XX. The arrival of Geoffery at this critical moment was accidental. He had scarcely time to gather from the appearance of Willoughby, and the incoherent expressions of Alfred, who seemed at one moment half wild, the next stupified by his grief, a somewhat confused notion of what had occurred, when his entrance was followed by that of Doctor Harman. The patient, however, being already quite dead, there remained nothing for the Doctor to do, but pronounce his opinion as to the probable cause of death, founded on the appearance of the body, and the symptoms of the attack, as described by those who had been present. This he did by expressing a suspicion that Sir Willoughby had swallowed poison, although he granted that similar symptoms might have been occasioned by a fit of apoplexy, and that such a fit might have had a fatal termination. To all Alfred's anxious inquiries if there was nothing that could be done, he replied decidedly that all was over. Alfred now stood for a considerable time with his arms folded, looking on his brother with a sort of mute despair, when a strange unbidden vision of the appearance which the water in Willoughby's goblet had presented, occurred to his memory. He turned towards the table on which the glasses still remained, and in a species of day-dream, lifted and examined that from which Willoughby had drunk. He perceived in the bottom a considerable quantity of whitish powder. Unfit for cool calculation, as were the powers of his mind at the moment, this, with all the circumstances, seemed to place it beyond a doubt, that Willoughby had taken the poison at the very time he had commented on the want of clearness of the water into which he was pouring his wine. With this conviction came again vague thoughts, as before, of expediency of concealing the fact of the suicide. Too wretched, however, to remember