erstand that the inquest
would be held early on the following morning, and Marie was imperious
with her mother and carried her point. So the poor woman was taken
away from Mr Longestaffe's residence, and never again saw the grandeur
of her own house in Grosvenor Square, which she had not visited since
the night on which she had helped to entertain the Emperor of China.

On Saturday morning the inquest was held. There was not the slightest
doubt as to any one of the incidents of the catastrophe. The servants,
the doctor, and the inspector of police between them, learned that he
had come home alone, that nobody had been near him during the night,
that he had been found dead, and that he had undoubtedly been poisoned
by prussic acid. It was also proved that he had been drunk in the
House of Commons, a fact to which one of the clerks of the House, very
much against his will, was called upon to testify. That he had
destroyed himself there was no doubt,--nor was there any doubt as to
the cause.

In such cases as this it is for the jury to say whether the
unfortunate one who has found his life too hard for endurance, and has
rushed away to see whether he could not find an improved condition of
things elsewhere, has or has not been mad at the moment. Surviving
friends are of course anxious for a verdict of insanity, as in that
case no further punishment is exacted. The body can be buried like any
other body, and it can always be said afterwards that the poor man was
mad. Perhaps it would be well that all suicides should be said to have
been mad, for certainly the jurymen are not generally guided in their
verdicts by any accurately ascertained facts. If the poor wretch has,
up to his last days, been apparently living a decent life; if he be
not hated, or has not in his last moments made himself specially
obnoxious to the world at large, then he is declared to have been mad.
Who would be heavy on a poor clergyman who has been at last driven by
horrid doubts to rid himself of a difficulty from which he saw no
escape in any other way? Who would not give the benefit of the doubt
to the poor woman whose lover and lord had deserted her? Who would
remit to unhallowed earth the body of the once beneficent philosopher
who has simply thought that he might as well go now, finding himself
powerless to do further good upon earth? Such, and such like, have of
course been temporarily insane, though no touch even of strangeness
may have marke