I opened the letter and read: 

DEAR DR. HESSELIUS.—­It is here.  You had not been an hour gone when it returned.  It is speaking.  It knows all that has happened.  It knows everything—­it knows you, and is frantic and atrocious.  It reviles.  I send you this.  It knows every word I have written—­I write.  This I promised, and I therefore write, but I fear very confused, very incoherently.  I am so interrupted, disturbed.

    Ever yours, sincerely yours,
    Robert Lynder Jennings.

“When did this come?” I asked.

“About eleven last night:  the man was here again, and has been here three times to-day.  The last time is about an hour since.”

Thus answered, and with the notes I had made upon his case in my pocket, I was in a few minutes driving towards Richmond, to see Mr. Jennings.

I by no means, as you perceive, despaired of Mr. Jennings’ case.  He had himself remembered and applied, though quite in a mistaken way, the principle which I lay down in my Metaphysical Medicine, and which governs all such cases.  I was about to apply it in earnest.  I was profoundly interested, and very anxious to see and examine him while the “enemy” was actually present.

I drove up to the sombre house, and ran up the steps, and knocked.  The door, in a little time, was opened by a tall woman in black silk.  She looked ill, and as if she had been crying.  She curtseyed, and heard my question, but she did not answer.  She turned her face away, extending her hand towards two men who were coming down-stairs; and thus having, as it were, tacitly made me over to them, she passed through a side-door hastily and shut it.

The man who was nearest the hall, I at once accosted, but being now close to him, I was shocked to see that both his hands were covered with blood.

I drew back a little, and the man, passing downstairs, merely said in a low tone, “Here’s the servant, sir.”

The servant had stopped on the stairs, confounded and dumb at seeing me.  He was rubbing his hands in a handkerchief, and it was steeped in blood.

“Jones, what is it? what has happened?” I asked, while a sickening suspicion overpowered me.

The man asked me to come up to the lobby.  I was beside him in a moment, and, frowning and pallid, with contracted eyes, he told me the horror which I already half guessed.

His master had made away with himself.

I went upstairs with him to the room—­what I saw there I won’t tell you.  He had cut his throat with his razor.  It was a frightful gash.  The two men had laid him on the bed, and composed his limbs.  It had happened, as the immense pool of blood on the floor declared, at some distance between the bed and the window.  There was carpet round his bed, and a carpet under his dressing-table, but none on the rest of the floor, for the man said he did not like a carpet on his bedroom.  In this sombre and now terrible room, one of the great elms that darkened the house was slowly moving the shadow of one of its great boughs upon this dreadful floor.