Here he laid down his pen; and Mrs. Brown presently announcing that everything was ready in his dressing-room, he thanked her, and proceeded to shave and dress. He was not more than a quarter of an hour over his toilet. He had put on his usual evening dress--his blue body-coat, black trousers, a plain shirt and black stock, and a white waistcoat--scarcely whiter, however, than the face of him who wore it. "I am going for the coach now, sir," said Mrs. Brown, knocking at the door. "If you please," he replied briskly and cheerfully--and the instant that he had heard her close the outer door after her, he opened the secret spring drawer in his desk, and took out a very small glass phial, with a glass stopper, over which was tied some bladder to preserve its contents from the air; then he carefully closed the drawer. His face was ghastly pale; his knees trembled; his hands were cold and damp as those of the dead. He took a strong peppermint lozenge from the mantelpiece, and chewed it, while he removed the stopper from the bottle, which contained about half a dram of the most subtle and potent poison which has been discovered by man--one extinguishing life almost instantaneously, and leaving no trace of its presence except a slight odor, which he had taken the precaution of masking and overpowering with that of the peppermint. He returned to get his hat, which was in his dressing-room; he put it on--and in glancing at the glass, scarcely recognized the ghastly image which it reflected. His chief object was, to complete the deception he intended practising on the Insurance Company, with whom he had effected a policy on his life for £2,000--and also to delude everybody into the notion of his having died suddenly, but naturally. Having stirred up the large red fire, and made a kind of hollow in it, he took out the stopper, and dropped it, with the bladder, which had been tied over it, into the fire. Then he took his pen in his right hand with a fresh dip of ink in it; kneeled down on the fender, close to the fire; faintly whispered "_Oh, Emma!_" poured the whole of the deadly poison into his mouth, and succeeded in dropping the phial into the very heart of the fire--falling down the next instant on the hearth-rug, oblivious, insensible--_dead_. However it might have been, that the moment after he had done this direful deed, he would have GIVEN THE WHOLE UNIVERSE, had it been his, to have undone what he had done--he had succeeded, _for the present_, in effecting his object.