For the first time, he took certain precautions with reference to his diet, such as were quite alien to his common habits.  On coming to the dinner-table, that day, he complained of headache, took but little food, and refused the cup of coffee which Elsie offered him, saying that it did not agree with him when he had these attacks.

Here was a new complication.  Obviously enough, he could not live in this way, suspecting everything but plain bread and water, and hardly feeling safe in meddling with them.  Not only had this school-keeping wretch come between him and the scheme by which he was to secure his future fortune, but his image had so infected his cousin’s mind that she was ready to try on him some of those tricks which, as he had heard hinted in the village, she had once before put in practice upon a person who had become odious to her.

Something must be done, and at once, to meet the double necessities of this case.  Every day, while the young girl was in these relations with the young man, was only making matters worse.  They could exchange words and looks, they could arrange private interviews, they would be stooping together over the same book, her hair touching his cheek, her breath mingling with his, all the magnetic attractions drawing them together with strange, invisible effluences.  As her passion for the schoolmaster increased, her dislike to him, her cousin, would grow with it, and all his dangers would be multiplied.  It was a fearful point he had reached.  He was tempted at one moment to give up all his plans and to disappear suddenly from the place, leaving with the schoolmaster, who had come between him and his object, an anonymous token of his personal sentiments which would be remembered a good while in the history of the town of Rockland.  This was but a momentary thought; the great Dudley property could not be given up in that way.

Something must happen at once to break up all this order of things.  He could think of but one Providential event adequate to the emergency,—­an event foreshadowed by various recent circumstances, but hitherto floating in his mind only as a possibility.  Its occurrence would at once change the course of Elsie’s feelings, providing her with something to think of besides mischief, and remove the accursed obstacle which was thwarting all his own projects.  Every possible motive, then,—­his interest, his jealousy, his longing for revenge, and now his fears for his own safety,—­urged him to regard the happening of a certain casualty as a matter of simple necessity.  This was the self-destruction of Mr. Bernard Langdon.

Such an event, though it might be surprising to many people, would not be incredible, nor without many parallel cases.  He was poor, a miserable fag, under the control of that mean wretch up there at the school, who looked as if he had sour buttermilk in his veins instead of blood.  He was in love with a girl above his station, rich, and of old family, but strange in all her ways, and it was conceivable that he should become suddenly jealous of her.  Or she might have frightened him with some display of her peculiarities which had filled him with a sudden repugnance in the place of love.  Any of these things were credible, and would make a probable story enough,—­so thought Dick over to himself with the New-England half of his mind.