funds, and escape from your liabilities; these
are old tricks of trade with you Office-gentlemen.
But you will not do it, sir: you will not
succeed. You have not an easy adversary to play
against, when you play against me. We shall
have to inquire, in due time, when and how Mr.
Beckwith fell into his present habits. With
that remark, sir, I put this poor creature and
his incoherent wanderings of speech, aside, and
wish you a good morning and a better case next
time."

While he was saying this, Beckwith had filled
a half-pint glass with brandy. At this moment,
he threw the brandy at his face, and threw the
glass after it. Slinkton put his hands up, half
blinded with the spirit, and cut with the glass
across the forehead. At the sound of the
breakage, a fourth person came into the room,
closed the door, and stood at it. He was a very
quiet but very keen looking man, with iron-grey
hair, and slightly lame.

Slinkton pulled out his handkerchief, assuaged
the pain in his smarting eyes, and dabbled the
blood on his forehead. He was a long time
about it, and I saw that, in the doing of it, a
tremendous change came over him, occasioned
by the change in Beckwith—who ceased to pant
and tremble, sat upright, and never took his
eyes off him. I never in my life saw a face in
which abhorrence and determination were so
forcibly painted, as in Beckwith's then.

"Look at me, you villain," said Beckwith,
"and see me as I really am. I took these
rooms, to make them a trap for you. I came
into them as a drunkard, to bait the trap for
you. You fell into the trap, and you will never
leave it alive. On the morning when you last
went to Mr. Sampson's office, I had seen him
first. Your plot has been known to both of us,
all along, and you have been counterplotted
all along. What? Having been cajoled into
putting that prize of two thousand pounds in
your power, I was to be done to death with
brandy, and, brandy not proving quick enough,
with something quicker? Have I never seen
you, when you thought my senses gone, pouring
from your little bottle into my glass? Why,
you Murderer and Forger, alone here with you
in the dead of the night, as I have so often been,
I have had my hand upon the trigger of a pistol,
twenty times, to blow your brains out!"

This sudden starting up of the thing that he
had supposed to be his imbecile victim, into a
determined man, with a settled resolution to
hunt him down and be the death of him
mercilessly expressed from head to foot, was, in the
first shock, too much for him. Without any
figure of speech, he staggered under it. But,
there is no greater mistake than to suppose,
that a man who is a calculating criminal, is, in
any phase of his guilt, otherwise than true to
himself and perfectly consistent with his whole
character. Such a man commits murder, and
murder is the natural culmination of his course;
such a man has to outface murder, and he will
do it with hardihood and effrontery. It is a sort
of fashion to express surprise that any notorious
criminal, having such crime upon his conscience,
can so brave it out. Do you think that if he had
it on his conscience, or had a conscience to have
it upon, he would ever have committed the crime?

Perfectly consistent with himself, as I believe
all such monsters to be, this Slinkton recovered
himself, and showed a defiance that was
sufficiently cold and quiet. He was white, he was
haggard, he was changed; but, only as a sharper
who had played for a great stake, and had been
outwitted and had lost the game.

"Listen to me, you villain," said Beckwith,
"and let every word you hear me say, be a stab
in your wicked heart. When I took these rooms,
to throw myself in your way and lead you on to
the scheme which I knew my appearance and
supposed character and habits would suggest to
such a devil, how did I know that? Because
you were no stranger to me. I knew you well.
And I knew you to be the cruel wretch who, for
so much money, had killed one innocent girl
while she trusted him implicitly, and who was,
by inches, killing another."

Slinkton took out a snuff-box, took a pinch of
snuff, and laughed.

"But, see here," said Beckwith, never looking
away, never raising his voice, never relaxing
his face, never unclenching his hand. "See
what a dull wolf you have been, after all! The
infatuated drunkard who never drank a fiftieth
part of the liquor you plied him with, but poured
it away, here, there, everywhere, almost before
your eyes—who bought over the fellow you set
to watch him and to ply him, by outbidding you
in his bribe, before he had been at his work three
days—with whom you have observed no caution,
yet who was so bent on ridding the earth of you
as a wild beast, that he would have defeated you
if you had been ever so prudent—that drunkard
whom you have many a time left on the floor
of this room, and who has even let you go out
of it, alive and undeceived, when you have
turned him over with your foot—has, almost as
often, on the same night, within an hour, within
a few minutes, watched you awake, had his hand
at your pillow when you were asleep, turned
over your papers, taken samples from your
bottles and packets of powder, changed their
contents, rifled every secret of your life!"

He had had another pinch of snuff in his
hand, but had gradually let it drop from
between his fingers to the floor, where he now
smoothed it out with his foot, looking down at
it the while.

"That drunkard," said Beckwith, "who had
free access to your rooms at all times, that he
might drink the strong drinks you left in
his way and be the sooner ended, holding no
more terms with you than he would hold with a
tiger, has had his master-key for all your locks,
his test for all your poisons, his clue to your
cipher writing. He can tell you, as well as you
can tell him, how long it took to complete that
deed, what doses there were, what intervals,
what signs of gradual decay upon mind and
body, what distempered fancies were produced,
what observable changes, what physical pain.