for the schoolmaster increased, her dislike to him, her cousin, would grow with it, and all his dangers would be multiplied.  It was a fearful point he had, reached.  He was tempted at one moment to give up all his plans and to disappear suddenly from the place, leaving with the schoolmaster, who had come between him and his object, an anonymous token of his personal sentiments which would be remembered a good while in the history of the town of Rockland.  This was but a momentary thought; the great Dudley property could not be given up in that way.

Something must happen at once to break up all this order of things.  He could think of but one Providential event adequate to the emergency,—­an event foreshadowed by various recent circumstances, but hitherto floating in his mind only as a possibility.  Its occurrence would at once change the course of Elsie’s feelings, providing her with something to think of besides mischief, and remove the accursed obstacle which was thwarting all his own projects.  Every possible motive, then,—­his interest, his jealousy, his longing for revenge, and now his fears for his own safety,—­urged him to regard the happening of a certain casualty as a matter of simple necessity.  This was the self-destruction of Mr. Bernard Langdon.

Such an event, though it might be surprising to many people, would not be incredible, nor without many parallel cases.  He was poor, a miserable fag, under the control of that mean wretch up there at the school, who looked as if he had sour buttermilk in his veins instead of blood.  He was in love with a girl above his station, rich, and of old family, but strange in all her ways, and it was conceivable that he should become suddenly jealous of her.  Or she might have frightened him with some display of her peculiarities which had filled him with a sudden repugnance in the place of love.  Any of these things were credible, and would make a probable story enough,—­so thought Dick over to himself with the New-England half of his mind.

Unfortunately, men will not always take themselves out of the way when, so far as their neighbors are concerned, it would be altogether the most appropriate and graceful and acceptable service they could render.  There was at this particular moment no special reason for believing that the schoolmaster meditated any violence to his own person.  On the contrary, there was good evidence that he was taking some care of himself.  He was looking well and in good spirits, and in the habit of amusing himself and exercising, as if to keep up his standard of health, especially of taking certain evening-walks, before referred to, at an hour when most of the Rockland people had “retired,” or, in vulgar language, “gone to bed.”

Dick Veneer settled it, however, in his own mind, that Mr. Bernard Langdon must lay violent hands upon himself.  He even went so far as to determine the precise hour, and the method in which the “rash act,” as it would undoubtedly be called in the next issue of “The Rockland Weekly Universe,” should be committed.  Time,—­this evening.  Method, asphyxia, by suspension.  It was, unquestionably, taking a great liberty with a man to decide that he should become felo de se without his own consent.  Such, however, was the decision of Mr. Richard Veneer with regard to Mr. Bernard Langdon.