Now he approached the dressing-table, turned the one gas burner on full, and lighted the other. Then he started back at the reflection of his own face in the glass; pale and haggard, eyes aflame with excitement, and lips reddened and parched with fever. For a moment fear made him pause--only for a moment. Flinging sober thought to the winds, he drew a chair to the table, pushed aside pincushion, toilet-cover, and ornaments, and took from his pocket a pencil and two letters. For at least an hour he continued to write on scraps of paper torn from his pocket-book. The dawn of a May morning was stealing through the staircase windows as Arthur Franklyn descended cautiously to the hall. On a table, near the entrance, as he well remembered, stood an inkstand and pens; these he carried upstairs and re-entered his room, in which the gas still burnt brightly, and closed the door carefully, to exclude the fast-increasing light of day. He was white now even to the lips as he again seated himself at the table, and drew from his breast coat pocket a document on which he signed, two names with different pens. Even in the midst of his evident excitement his hand was firm. Then he dashed down the pen, to the great detriment of the toilet-cover, turned off the gas, and threw himself on the bed dressed as he was, to try and lose in the sleep of forgetfulness for a time a memory of what he had done. The old school-bell for breakfast woke him next morning from a heavy sleep, and also awoke in him painful memories of olden times, when a happy innocent lad, he had so often answered its summons. He rose hastily, bathed his face, and battled for a time with the emotions that overpowered him. Strange to say, the memories of his youthful days strengthened, his determination to carry out what he had last night begun. "Could he allow the children of his lost Fanny to starve in poverty, or to feel that their father could support them no longer?" No! impossible! he must carry it through--she, his second wife, would have done it had she lived; no one would be injured, the money was his morally, and if not quite legally, that was of no consequence. This decision produced a kind of calm, like the effects of an opiate, so that when he appeared at breakfast the haggard look of excitement was gone; the pale, calm face created a feeling of sympathy, more especially in the warm heart of Kate Marston, whom Fanny's children had already learnt to love. During the day when he attended the inquest he listened with almost stoical indifference to a detail of the circumstances attending his wife's death. He answered the questions put to him by the coroner calmly and truthfully; not even the examination of the medical man, from whose evidence he learnt that a _post-mortem_ examination had taken place, could rouse in him the slightest interest. Yet the pale and sorrowful expression of his face excited the sympathy of those present, especially while being questioned by the coroner.