“Now, papa, you will go to bed very soon yourself, won’t you?” she urged.  “You look sick, and I know you are tired out.”

“Very soon, honey,” Carroll replied.

After Charlotte had gotten into bed, and lay there with her lamp on a stand beside her and her book in hand, she listened more than she read.  When in the course of half an hour she heard her father come up the stairs and enter his own room, she gave a sigh of relief.  “Good-night, papa,” she called out.

“Good-night, dear,” he responded.  Then Charlotte fell asleep with her light burning and her book in her hand, and she did not hear her father go softly over the stairs a second time.

As was said, his mind, in regaining its normal balance, had swung too far to the opposite direction.  His desire to live, that possessed him, was as much too intense as his previous desire to die.  He had for the time being another fixed idea, not as dangerous in a sense as the other, at least not to himself, but still dangerous.  The miserable little bottle of chloroform became, in this second abnormal state of his mind, the key-note on which his strenuous thoughts harped.  It seemed to him that that bottle with its red label of “Poison” was as horrible a thing to have as a blood-stained knife of murder.  It was in a sense blood-stained.  It bore the stigma of the self-murderer.  It bore evidence to his hideous cowardice, his unspeakable crime of spirit.  He felt that he must do away with that bottle; but how?  After he was in his room, and the door locked, he took the bottle from its neat wrapper of pink paper and looked at it.  It seemed like an absurdly easy thing to dispose of; but it did not, when he reflected, seem easy at all.  It was not a thing to burn, or throw away.  He thought of opening the window and giving it a fling; but what was to hinder some one finding it in the morning under the windows?  The man actually sat down and gazed awhile at the small phial of death with utter helplessness and horror; and as he did so, the always smouldering wrath of his soul towards that man in Kentucky, that man who had wronged him, swelled to its height.  He had always hated him, but his hate had never assumed such strength as this.  He became conscious, as he had never been before, that that man was responsible for it all, even to the crowning horror and ignominy of that bottle.  He reflected that no man of his name had ever, so far as he knew, stained it as he had done by his life; that no man of his name had ever so stained the record of his race by the contemplation of such a dastardly death.  He felt, gazing at that bottle, every whit as guilty as if he had drained the contents, and he told himself that that man was responsible, that that man had murdered him in the worst and subtlest way in which murder can be done; he had caused him to do away with his own honor.  He felt himself alive to his furthest fancy with hate and a desire for revenge.

“I will live, and I will have the better of him yet,” he muttered to himself.