Success meant a crown of triumphant honour; failure, a kind of sane madness, whose only end could be death--a death he was compelled to seek to save himself at once--to save himself from being treated as a maniac, and then to spend a few weeks or months of torture which he knew he could not bear. In his last paragraphs he pointed out his position. He was believed to be mad, and to clear himself he would have to explain his experiment and his abnormal position, which he owned that no one would or could be expected to believe, save such a _savant_ as the one he addressed--a man who had made the brain his study, and who could feel for the sufferings of the writer. This letter was enclosed in the packet addressed to his executors for delivery to Mr Delton, and lay in the study, waiting till those executors should receive the last commands. All was at an end now, and with a feeling of calmness approaching to content, Horace North looked round his surgery with its many familiar objects; and without the slightest feeling of dread took down a small medicine glass from the set standing all ready upon a shelf, and then lifted a large bottle from one particular spot at the end where it always stood, veiling a little recess wherein were a couple of smaller bottles, carefully labelled and marked as to their degree of strength. "Is it cowardly?" he said quietly. "Is it a sin? Surely not, when I know my position, and--yes, that is my fate." For at that moment there was a sharp crack: the door had yielded, and he knew that his cousin's emissaries--the people from some private asylum-- had forced their way into the study, and their next step would be to make their way to where he was. He could have opened the door, and fled by way of the meadows; but where? To whom? Perhaps at the moment when he made his first appeal for help, the living shadow that he had, as it were, taken to him, would utter some wild cry or absurd jest, and people would believe his pursuers in spite of all that he could declare. No, it was not cowardice, this hastening of his end; and, withdrawing the stopper, he began pouring out the liquid contents of the little bottle, as the handle of the surgery door was turned, and the panel gave an ominous crack. "You shall let me pass away in peace," he said quietly, as he drew away a chair which propped back an inner door of baize, let it swing to, and thrust in both its bolts. "Cousin Thompson," he said bitterly, "you were always a miserable wretch, but I withdraw my curse. Take all, and enjoy your wretched life as well as such a reptile can." He paused for a few moments, with his lips moving slowly, and a calm look of resignation softening the harsh austerities of his face. "To forgiveness!" he said softly. "To oblivion!" and he raised the glass to his lips. Volume 3, Chapter XIX. VISION OR REAL. The shivering of glass as the fragments of a pane fell tinkling upon the carpet.