The gate closed on Julius.  Anne returned again to the solitude of her own chamber.  Geoffrey entered the drawing-room, placed the volumes of the Newgate Calendar on the table before him, and resumed the reading which he had been unable to continue on the evening before.

Hour after hour he doggedly plodded through one case of murder after another.  He had read one good half of the horrid chronicle of crime before his power of fixing his attention began to fail him.  Then he lit his pipe, and went out to think over it in the garden.  However the atrocities of which he had been reading might differ in other respects, there was one terrible point of resemblance, which he had not anticipated, and in which every one of the cases agreed.  Sooner or later, there was the dead body always certain to be found; always bearing its dumb witness, in the traces of poison or in the marks of violence, to the crime committed on it.

He walked to and fro slowly, still pondering over the problem which had first found its way into his mind when he had stopped in the front garden and had looked up at Anne’s window in the dark.  “How?” That had been the one question before him, from the time when the lawyer had annihilated his hopes of a divorce.  It remained the one question still.  There was no answer to it in his own brain; there was no answer to it in the book which he had been consulting.  Every thing was in his favor if he could only find out “how.”  He had got his hated wife up stairs at his mercy—­thanks to his refusal of the money which Julius had offered to him.  He was living in a place absolutely secluded from public observation on all sides of it—­thanks to his resolution to remain at the cottage, even after his landlady had insulted him by sending him a notice to quit.  Every thing had been prepared, every thing had been sacrificed, to the fulfillment of one purpose—­and how to attain that purpose was still the same impenetrable mystery to him which it had been from the first!

What was the other alternative?  To accept the proposal which Julius had made.  In other words, to give up his vengeance on Anne, and to turn his back on the splendid future which Mrs. Glenarm’s devotion still offered to him.

Never!  He would go back to the books.  He was not at the end of them.  The slightest hint in the pages which were still to be read might set his sluggish brain working in the right direction.  The way to be rid of her, without exciting the suspicion of any living creature, in the house or out of it, was a way that might be found yet.

Could a man, in his position of life, reason in this brutal manner? could he act in this merciless way?  Surely the thought of what he was about to do must have troubled him this time!

Pause for a moment—­and look back at him in the past.