These were the thoughts of solitude and of darkness. He slept again, and awoke only to fear, as he beheld the full light of day penetrating every where, and making the true forms of all things evident, that his scheme of murderous treachery was too monstrous to be practicable. No one would listen to such a proposition: and as for proofs, could circumstances be indeed tortured into any strong enough to meet the powerful current of opinion, flowing in the opposite direction? Yet, on the other hand, such things had been heard of, and without one-tenth part the stake as to property, which in this instance might be alleged as one powerful incentive, while there was room also to suppose the workings of violent jealousy, and even of revenge. His own mother, moreover, could be summoned to prove that he had actually been accepted, and that he himself ascribed his disappointment afterwards to the rivalship of his brother. At this moment a servant answered Geoffery's bell, prepared to assist him at his morning toilet. The man's face was full of importance and mystery; Geoffery noted this, and willing to encourage the fellow, in whatever he might have to tell respecting the opinions of servants, &c., said, "Why, Davison, you look absolutely frightened! What is the matter?" "I don't know that I have got any occasion to look frightened," said the man, "for whatever way the poor gentleman came by his death, whether by a fit, as some _sais_, or by poison, as others _thinks_, it was nearly over with him before ever we came to the house. But there's no saying, for that matter, who'll be blamed, or who wont; they are all in such a taking about it below, as never was." "How do you mean?" "Why the coachman thinks that as it was he that went to Arden for the arsenic for laying for the rats, for it was in the stable-lofts they were most troublesome, that he'll get brought into some mischief, although he had his master's orders; but who is to prove that, now poor Sir Willoughby's dead and gone? And for the butler, he's afraid of his life, but people may think that something must have been wrong with the glasses or the water, when he carried them in; and so he took Johnson and myself to the saddle-room, that we should see where the arsenic lay, and so judge that it was impossible for it to come near any thing that was for eating or drinking. When we got there, however, the packet with the poison was nowhere to be found, although it had lain on the very shelf he showed us, in that selfsame room (the butler _sais_), no longer ago than yesterday forenoon, when poor Sir Willoughby and Mr. Alfred looked at it themselves."