"Clear myself!" answered the man, his eyes flashing with rage, through the honest tears he had been shedding for his master. "I'd be glad to know who'll accuse--I who have served his father, and his grandfather before him, man and boy these fifty-five years, and have nursed himself and his brother one on each knee, many's the time." "Far be it from me, Thomas, to accuse you or any one else of such a crime as murder; I only suspect you of unpardonable carelessness; but I must say, and I know something of the law, as you may suppose, that circumstances are very strong against you; it may be thought that you intended to poison both brothers, and rob the house; my arrival was unexpected; such things you know have been done! Nothing I should think can clear you, but its being satisfactorily proved who is to blame. You brought up the glasses; poison has been found in one of them, and there was no one in the room but Sir Willoughby, his brother, and yourself. You certainly would get nothing by the death of Sir Willoughby, unless, as I said before, you had made away with both gentlemen, and robbed the house; that is so far in your favour: yet no one, you know, could think of suspecting his own brother, and circumstances seem to lay the mischief, however it happened, at the door of one or the other." "No one who had not got the heart of the devil in his breast would lay it at the door of either," replied the man, angrily. Without noticing his irritation, Geoffery proceeded, "I still mean in the way of accident or mistake. Some of you talk, I understand, of Sir Alfred having been the person who removed the paper of arsenic." And here he enlarged as before, on the affliction our hero would no doubt suffer, could he at all blame himself for any thing that had happened, and how cruel it would therefore be to mention the subject to him. "Was the arsenic at any time kept in the same place with the glasses? Do you think you might have scattered any quantity about, in lifting it from shelf to shelf?" "I wiped out the glasses with my own hands, the moment before I carried them in. Besides, the arsenic was never in the cupboard with my things at all, it lay on a shelf in the saddle-room, quite out of the way of what was for any one's use, and was marked in large letters, "arsenic, poison"; for Sir Willoughby was very particular in his orders to me to be careful about it, and made me show him where I put it, and that Mr. Alfred knows, for he was with his brother at the same time, no longer since than yesterday forenoon." "If your statement is correct, I do not see how it was possible for an accident to have happened," said Geoffery, "could you swear that it was not possible for an accident to have occurred?" "Yes, I could," he replied, though sulkily. "That is," he added, "as long as the arsenic lay where I left it."