t up the chloroform
in a bottle marked poison in red letters, changed the bill which
Carroll gave him in payment, and remarked that it was a cold day and
looked like snow. The boy was hurrying to finish his chocolate, that
he might follow again this object of his admiration, but Carroll
caught sight of the Banbridge car coming up the street, after having
made an unusually long wait at the terminus of the line.

"Take your time, my boy. I have to go," he said, and hurried out to
the car, leaving the boy staring wistfully after him with the
chocolate sweet upon his tongue.

Carroll, with his chloroform in his pocket, boarded the car, and
speeded again over the road to Banbridge. The way home seemed to him
like a dream. He was not conscious of much about him; his mind now
seemed concentrated on that small bottle in his pocket. He noticed
nobody in the car, but sat in his corner, with eyes fixed absently on
the flying landscape. The conductor had to speak twice before he
realized that he was asking for his fare. When the car reached the
end of the line in Banbridge, he sat still for a few seconds before
he collected himself enough to understand that the end of his journey
was reached, and it was time for him to get off the car and walk home.

Walking along the familiar way, his apathy began to fail and his
nervous excitement returned. He began to realize everything, this
hideous end to his failure of a life which was so rapidly
approaching. He realized that he was walking alone to his deserted
home, cold and cheerless, dark and silent. It was already dusk, the
days were short and the sky heavily clouded. The raw wind from the
northeast smote him hard in the face like a diffused flail of wrath.
He thought of his wife and children and sister speeding along to
their old home in the cheerful Pullman-car. He reflected that about
this time they would be thinking of going to the dining-car for their
dinner. He reflected that after the chloroform had done its work,
they would be well cared for in Kentucky, much better off than they
had ever been under his doubtful protection; that Eddy might grow up
to be a better man than his father, that Charlotte would marry down
there, that they would all be comfortable, and in the intense and
abnormal self-centredness of the mood which was upon him, that mood
which leads a man to escape from his own agony of life by the first
exit, that awful hunger for the beyond of his own soul, he never