“I sprang out of bed and rushed down the stairs.  As I reached the hall, someone ran past me in the darkness.  There was a blinding flash close to my face and a deafening explosion; and when I recovered my sight, the form of a man appeared for an instant dimly silhouetted in the opening of the street door.  The door closed with a bang, leaving the house wrapped in silence and gloom.

“My first impulse was to pursue the man, but it immediately gave way to alarm for my wife.  I groped my way into the dining-room and was creeping towards the place where the matches were kept when my bare foot touched something soft and bulky.  I stooped to examine it and my outspread hand came in contact with a face.

“I sprang up with a gasp of terror and searched frantically for the matches.  In a few moments I had found them and tremblingly struck a light; and the first glimmer of the flame turned my deadly fear into yet more deadly realization.  My wife lay on the hearth-rug, her upturned face as white as marble, her half-open eyes already glazing.  A great, brown scorch marked the breast of her night-dress and at its center was a small stain of blood.

“She was stone dead.  I saw that at a glance.  The bullet must have passed right through her heart and she must have died in an instant.  That, too, I saw.  And though I called her by her name and whispered words of tenderness into her ears; though I felt her pulseless wrists and chafed her hands—­so waxen now and chill—­I knew that she was gone.

“I was still kneeling beside her, crazed, demented by grief and horror; still stroking her poor white hand, telling her that she was my dear one, my little Kate, and begging her, foolishly, to come back to me, to be my little friend and playmate as of old; still, I say, babbling in the insanity of grief, when I heard a soft step descending the stairs.  It came nearer.  The door opened and someone stole into the room on tip-toe.  It was the housemaid, Harratt.  She stood stock still when she saw us and stared and uttered strange whimpering cries like a frightened dog.  And then, suddenly, she turned and stole away silently as she had come, and I heard her running softly upstairs.  Presently she came down again, but this time she passed the dining-room and went out of the street door.  I vaguely supposed she had gone for assistance, but the matter did not concern me.  My wife was dead.  Nothing mattered now.

“Harratt did not return, however, and I soon forgot her.  The death of my dear one grew more real.  I began to appreciate it as an actual fact.  And with this realization, the question of my own death arose.  I took it for granted from the first.  The burden of solitary existence was not to be entertained for a moment.  The only question was how, and I debated this in leisurely fashion, sitting on the floor with Kate’s hand in mine.  I had a pistol upstairs and, of course, there were keen-edged scalpels in the laboratory.  But, strange as it may appear, the bias of an anatomical training even then opposed the idea of gross mechanical injuries.  However, there were plenty of poisons available, and to this method I inclined as more decent and dignified.