Creighton’s unfortunate canine companion had given some trouble already, which Herries had not grudged. Within the hour of his master’s death, when it was necessary that the last offices should be done, Herries had coaxed the poor starving brute from his post upon the bed, tempting him with a piece of meat. But no sooner was the morsel swallowed than the creature ran back to the room of death, and scratching at the door, pushed in and leapt upon the bed. Nothing had since dislodged him, and Herries had ordered him to be left in peace—a solitary mourner. It had been a mistaken kindness, for thirst had probably now turned the beast rabid. Herries took a pistol out of its case, and primed and loaded it. For Dick there could only be the kindly ultimatum of a bullet. He went straight to Mr. Creighton’s lodgings. It was the same March morning, windy, but now fair, which was seeing Alison on her sad way home. The wind cut him like a knife, though it was not really cold. He had eaten nothing for many hours, and a wretchedness of spirit was upon him, beyond anything that he had deemed it possible he could know. In Creighton’s room the coffin stood upon its trestles, and stiff and still, beneath the sheet upon the bed, lay its belated occupant. At the starkly upturned feet crouched the terrier, his red eyes glowing like cinders, at every slightest sound or movement drawing his lips back from his teeth in a rabid snarl. Herries approached him, with a half hope the dog would know him and be pacified, but the brute would have sprung at him in a moment. He drew back sufficiently far to take a deliberate and steady aim. The shot rang out with terrific reverberation within the narrow, echoing limits of the empty room, which filled instantly with a blue and pungent smoke. When that cleared off, Herries perceived the dog had hardly moved, arrested in his crouching attitude by swift death. Presently a single scarlet trickle from behind his ear stained the whiteness of his master’s shroud, his fierce eye dimmed and glazed, and his bristling body stiffened as it lay. Herries, the smoking pistol in his hand, stood still a moment—in his disordered dress, and with his pale, set face and bloodshot eyes, a singularly haunting image of the suicide. But just as some men, too strong to swoon, must bear a physical agony to its last limit, so to Herries, with the accurately-balanced character of his intellect and his temper, the impulse of self-destruction could never come. He must bear, he would overcome: the iron will survived; the brain, active and restless, keen and clear, worked on—a finely-regulated mechanism. But his heart was empty, and from that moment he closed its portals on the world. * * * * * *CHAPTER XLII.*