Every nerve tingled; his fingers clutched the bottle like hot wires—­that bottle which that other man had caused him to buy, and which he could not get rid of, this palpable witness to his crime and disgrace.

Finally he got up and threw up the window; then he put it down again.  It did not seem to him, in his unreasoning state, that he could probably empty the chloroform out of the window without the slightest danger of detection, and then scrape the label from the bottle.  It did not seem possible to him that Charlotte would not immediately perceive the fumes of the drug which would cry to her from the ground.  Her room was next his own.  He sat down again and gazed at the bottle with the absurd bewilderment of a drunken man.  Then he tried stowing it away in a drawer of the dresser, behind a pile of shirts.  He even, after doing that, began to undress, but that did not satisfy him.  It seemed certain to him that Charlotte would find it in the morning, and say, “Why, papa, what is this bottle marked ‘Poison’ in your drawer?”

At last he unlocked his door, opened it, and stole softly down-stairs.  He unfastened the kitchen door, and went across the field and garden behind the house, to the little pond beside the rustic arbor, the little sentimental Idlewild of the original dwellers in the house.  It was a dark, waving night.  It still did not storm, and was warmer.  It would probably rain before morning.  The wind smote his face damply.  He had come out in his shirt-sleeves.  He moved slyly, like a thief; he felt like one, like a thief and a murderer—­a self-murderer, and a murderer, in will, of the man who had caused him to commit the crime.  He felt burning with hate as he slunk across the field, of hate of the man who had brought him to this, who had caused his financial and moral downfall.  At that time, had the man been near, his life would have been worth nothing.  Carroll thought, as he hurried on, holding fast to the bottle, how he could overthrow him, uncork the bottle and hold it to his face, that he might inhale the death he had meted out to him.  It seemed to him like the merest instinct of self-defence.  He stumbled now and then over the tangle of dry vines in the garden, among the corn-stalks.  He went like a guilty thing, instead of moving with his usual confident state, the state of a gentleman from a long line of gentlemen.  He had become alive to his own shame, his own ignominy, and he had turned at bay upon the one who had caused him, as he judged, to fall.

When he reached the little pond, he paused and looked about him for a second.  It was a desolate spot at that time of year and that hour.  The little sheet of water gleamed dully like an obscured eye of life.  The trees waved their slender arms over it.  Something about the summer-house creaked as a damp wind blew on his face.  He saw through the trees a faint gleam of light from a house window farther down the road.  He heard a rustle in the undergrowth on his right, probably a stray cat or a bird.  He stood there holding the bottle of chloroform and hating that man; then he raised his arm and flung the thing into the pond.  There was a splash which sounded unnaturally loud, as if it could be heard a long distance.