or revenge.

"I will live, and I will have the better of him yet," he muttered to
himself.

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. H