But after a long time, there was a reaction:  she sat down and uttered some plaintive sounds inarticulate, or nearly; and at last she began to cry.

Then it cost Falcon an effort not to come in and comfort her; but he controlled himself and kept quiet.

She rang the bell.  She asked for writing paper, and she wrote her unseen tormentor a humble note, begging him, for old acquaintance, to call on her, and tell her what his mysterious words meant that had filled her with agitation.

This done, she went away, with a deep sigh, and Falcon emerged, and pounced upon her letter.

He kissed it; he read it a dozen times:  he sat down where she had sat, and his base passion overpowered him.  Her beauty, her agitation, her fear, her tears, all combined to madden him, and do the devil’s work in his false, selfish heart, so open to violent passions, so dead to conscience.

For once in his life he was violently agitated, and torn by conflicting feelings:  he walked about the room more wildly than his victim had; and if it be true that, in certain great temptations, good and bad angels fight for a man, here you might have seen as fierce a battle of that kind as ever was.

At last he rushed out into the air, and did not return till ten o’clock at night.  He came back pale and haggard, and with a look of crime upon his face.

True Bohemian as he was, he sent for a pint of brandy.

So then the die was cast, and something was to be done that called for brandy.

He bolted himself in, and drank a wine-glass of it neat; then another; then another.

Now his pale cheek is flushed, and his eye glitters.  Drink forever! great ruin of English souls as well as bodies.

He put the poker in the fire, and heated it red hot.

He brought Staines’s letter, and softened the sealing-wax with the hot poker; then with his pen-knife made a neat incision in the wax, and opened the letter.  He took out the ring, and put it carefully away.  Then he lighted a cigar, and read the letter, and studied it.  Many a man, capable of murder in heat of passion, could not have resisted the pathos of this letter.  Many a Newgate thief, after reading it, would have felt such pity for the loving husband who had suffered to the verge of death, and then to the brink of madness, and for the poor bereaved wife, that he would have taken the letter down to Gravesend that very night, though he picked two fresh pockets to defray the expenses of the road.

But this was an egotist.  Good nature had curbed his egotism a little while; but now vanity and passion had swept away all unselfish feelings, and the pure egotist alone remained.

Now, the pure egotist has been defined as a man who will burn down his neighbor’s house to cook himself an egg.  Murder is but egotism carried out to its natural climax.  What is murder to a pure egotist, especially a brandied one?