The clock struck eleven, and mechanically he poured out the dose from the larger bottle and gave it to the sick man. When it was done he left the bedside and the inner room quickly and went back to the open window. The air was thick and stifling, and when he sat down in the deep window-seat he was gasping for breath. It was going to be harder than he had thought it would, though now that the time had come he realized that he had been subconsciously planning for it, preparing for it. And the means which had been thrust into his hands could scarcely have been simpler. He had only to sit still and do nothing--and no one would ever know. He took up the small phial and held it to the light: ten drops, or forty drops; they would neither be missed, nor counted if they should remain. The single chiming stroke of the quarter-past struck while he was putting the bottle down, and he started as if the mellow cadence had been a pistol shot. For fifteen minutes longer he could live and breathe and be as other men are; and after that.... He saw himself looking back upon the normal world from the new view-point, as he fancied Cain might have looked back after the mark had been set upon his brow. Would it really make the hideous, monstrous difference that all men seemed to think it did? He would know, presently, when the revocable should have become the irrevocable. He heard the sick man stir feebly, and then the sound of his slow, labored breathing made itself felt, rather than heard, in the crushing, stifling silence. How the minutes dragged! He leaned his head against the window jamb and closed his eyes, striving fiercely to drive forth the thronging thoughts; to make his mind a blank. Gradually the effort succeeded. He was conscious of a dull, throbbing, soothing pulse beating slow measures in his temples, and a curious roaring as of distant cataracts in his ears; and after that, nothing. * * * * * A tempestuous thunder shower was lashing the trees on the lawn when he awoke with a start and found Margery bending over him to close the window. With every nerve a needle to prick him alive he dragged out his watch. It was a quarter-past two. Miserably, wretchedly he pulled himself together and stood up to face her, putting his hands on her shoulders to make her look up at him. "Margery, girl; do you know what I have done?--Oh, my God! I am a murderer--a murderer at last!" She turned her face away quickly. "Oh, no, no, boy!--not meaning to be!" she murmured. "What is the difference?" he demanded harshly. And then: "God knows--He knows whether I meant it or not." She looked up again, and, as once or twice before in his knowing of her, he saw the dark eyes swimming.