e impression
or memory which evaded him. Continuing to look at the key, a certain
recollection all at once assumed great definiteness in his mind: it came
to him that the labels on this patent fumigator they were using warned
people against exposing themselves to its fumes more than was absolutely
necessary. That meant, of course, that their full force would kill a
human being. It was very interesting. He looked through the glass again,
but could not see that the air was any thicker. The lamp still burned
brightly.

He turned away, and beheld a man, in an old cap and apron, at the
further end of the palm-house he was in, doing something to a plant.
Thorpe noted the fact that he felt no surprise in seeing that it was
Gafferson. Somehow the sight of the key, and of the poison-spreading
flame inside the locked door, seemed to have prepared him for the
spectacle of Gafferson close at hand. He moved forward slowly toward the
head-gardener, and luminous plans rose in his mind, ready-made at
each step. He could strangle this annoying fool, or smother him, into
non-resisting insensibility, and then put him inside that death-house,
and let it be supposed that he had been asphyxiated by accident. The men
when they came back would find him there. But ah! they would know that
they had not left him there; they would have seen him outside, no doubt,
after the fire had been lighted. Well, the key could be left in the
unlocked door. Then it could be supposed that he had rashly entered, and
been overcome by the vapours. He approached the man silently, his brain
arranging the details of the deed with calm celerity.

Then some objections to the plan rose up before him: they dealt almost
exclusively with the social nuisance the thing would entail. There was
to be a house-party, with that Duke and Duchess in it, of whom his
wife talked so much, and it would be a miserable kind of bore to have
a suffocated gardener forced upon them as a principal topic of
conversation. Of course, too, it would more or less throw the whole
household into confusion. And its effect upon his wife!--the progress
of his thoughts was checked abruptly by this suggestion. A vision of the
shock such a catastrophe might involve to her--or at the best, of the
gross unpleasantness she would find in it--flashed over his mind, and
then yielded to a softening, radiant consciousness of how much this
meant to him. It seemed to efface everything else upon the instant. A
prof