The peculiar circumstances attendant on the death-scene, and the certain knowledge thus obtained, that poison had been taken, and would, therefore, on opening the body be found, suggested to Geoffery's evil mind the first faint glimpses of the diabolical scheme which so many after circumstances so unexpectedly favoured. Had there been a fire in his apartment that night, he would for security have certainly burnt the packet; but it fortunately happened that there was not, and so agitated and occupied was his mind in the contemplation of the very possibility of compassing at once the hideous crime and enormous gain, which he was balancing one against the other, that the idea of destroying the dangerous document by means of his candle never once occurred to him. Accordingly, when he had sufficiently considered its contents, he placed it in his pocket-book. After this, he more than once took it out, with the intention of consigning it to the flames, but when in the very act his hand was stayed by more than one consideration. In the first place, there was a kind of bequest to himself; and if the accusations against Alfred came to nothing, he should want the sum very much; then he sometimes felt a dread, that by a bare possibility, he might himself,--as having a remote contingent interest in the death of Willoughby, and having arrived too that very night at Arden,--be accused of being an accomplice of Alfred's; and in either case this packet laid down in some of the apartments, would be picked up, and being supposed to have hitherto merely lain unnoticed, both clear himself of all suspicion and secure his bequest; for though this bequest was not left in a binding form, he had no doubt that Alfred would religiously make it good. No place, however, seemed safe enough for keeping this important document but about his own person, and accordingly he so disposed of it; which serves to account for its being found in the manner described. The packet itself presented a melancholy picture of poor Willoughby's disordered state of mind, brought down somewhat in the form of a journal, and with a kind of method mingled with its wildness to the very evening of his death. In proof of the strange blending of rational considerations, there was a sort of distribution of his personal property; for besides the bequest to Geoffery, already alluded to, there were kind gifts to his sisters, his mother, his aunt Dorothea, and to several old servants and pensioners.