d 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?

I knew an egotist who met a female acquaintance in Newhaven village. She
had a one-pound note, and offered to treat him. She changed this note to
treat him. Fish she gave him, and much whiskey. Cost her four shillings.
He ate and drank with her, at her expense; and his aorta, or principal
blood-vessel, being warmed with her whiskey, he murdered her for the
change, the odd sixteen shillings.

I had the pleasure of seeing that egotist hung, with these eyes. It was
a slice of luck that, I grieve to say, has not occurred again to me.

So much for a whiskied egotist.

His less truculent but equally remorseless brother in villany, the
brandied egotist, Falcon, could read that poor husband's letter without
blenching; the love and the anticipations of rapture, these made him
writhe a little with jealousy, but they roused not a grain of pity. He
was a true egotist, blind, remorseless.

In this, his true character, he studied the letter profoundly, and
mastered all the facts, and digested them well.

All manner of diabolical artifices presented themselves to his brain,
barren of true intellect, yet fertile in fraud; in that, and all low
cunning and subtlety, far more than a match for Solomon or Bacon.

His sinister studies were pursued far into the night. Then he went to
bed, and his unbounded egotism gave him the sleep a grander criminal
would have courted in vain on the verge of a monstrous and deliberate
crime.

Next day he went to a fashionable tailor, and ordered a complete suit of
black. This was made in forty-eight hours; the interval was spent mainly
in concocting lies to be incorporated with the number of minute facts he
had gained from Staines's letter, and in making close imitations of his
handwriting.

Thus armed, and crammed with more lies than the "Menteur" of Corneille,
but not such innocent ones, he went down to Gravesend, all in deep
mourning, with crape round his hat.

He presented himself at the villa.

The servant was all obsequiousnes