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 f