At last he heard a footfall on the road, which passed but some few yards distant from his window, a quick, cheery, almost running footfall, a step full of youth and life, sounding crisp on the hard frozen ground; and he knew that the young man whom he hated had come. Though he had never thought of murdering him,--as he told himself,--yet he hated him. And then his thoughts, although in opposition to his own wishes,--which were intent upon sleep, if sleep would only come to him,--ran away to the building of other castles. How would it have been now, now at this moment, if that plan, which he had never really intended to carry out, which had only been a speculation, had been a true plan and been truly executed? How would it have been with them all now at Trafford Park? The Marchioness would have been at any rate altogether satisfied;--but what comfort would there have been in that to him? Lord Frederic would have been the heir to a grand title and to vast estates;--but how would he have been the better for that? The old lord who was lying there so sick in the next room might probably have sunk into his grave with a broken heart. The Marquis had of late been harsh to him; but there did come to him an idea at the present moment that he had for thirty years eaten the sick man's bread. And the young man would have been sent without a moment's notice to meet his final doom! Of what nature that might have been, the wretched man lying there did not dare even to make a picture in his imagination. It was a matter which he had sedulously and successfully dismissed from all his thoughts. It was of the body lying out there in the cold, not of the journey which the winged soul might make, that he unwillingly drew a picture to himself. He conceived how he himself, in the prosecution of the plan which he had formed, would have been forced to have awakened the house, and to tell of the deed, and to assist in carrying the body to what resting-place might have been found for it. There he would have had to enact a part of which he had, a few hours since, told himself that he would be capable, but in attempting which he was now sure that he would have succumbed to the difficulties of the struggle. Who would have broken the news to the father? Who would have attempted to speak the first word of vain consolation? Who would have flown to the lady's door up-stairs and have informed her that death was in the house--and have given her to understand that the eldest of her darlings was the heir? It would have been for him to do it all; for him with a spirit weighed down to the ground by that terrible burden with which the doing of such a deed would have loaded it. He would certainly have revealed himself in the struggle!