On Friday morning, as Dr. Webster admitted,
he went to Dr. Parkman's house, and asked
him to call on him at half-past one the same day
at the college. That engagement he kept
punctually, and there all discernible trace of him
ended.

A further disclosure was, however, made,
which showed that one material portion of Dr.
Webster's story was untrue. A gentleman familiar
with the accounts of both, and aware of the
only possible funds out of which Dr. Webster
had the means of paying, discovered that,
after Dr. Parkman's disappearance, Dr.
Webster had applied that money to a totally
different purpose, and, consequently, that his
debt had not been discharged as he represented.
Suspicion thus engendered as to one point
became painfully excited by further scrutiny
into others. Dr. Webster's professional duties,
it will be remembered, lay partly at Harvard
College, in Cambridge, and partly at the
Medical School at Boston. At the latter his
lectures were delivered on four days in each
week—Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and
Friday—ending at one o'clock on each
occasion. In inviting Dr. Parkman to call on him
on Friday at half-past one, he named an hour
at which all the classes would be closed and the
students dispersed; besides which, the interval
from one o'clock on Friday till his pupils would
reassemble on the Tuesday following was the
longest that could occur in any week without
risk of intrusion from visitors or persons on
business. It was the professor's habit to
return to Cambridge immediately after the
delivery of his lecture at Boston; but it was
noticed that on Friday, the 23rd, he
remained in his laboratory till late in the winter
evening; that he returned to his rooms again
on Saturday, when there was no class to
address, a thing he was not known to do
before, and not only so, but that he came there
on Sunday. Nor was this all; in the week
which followed there fell a festival of the church,
during which no lectures were delivered after
Tuesday. Yet on every day of that week—
from Monday till Friday—Dr. Webster was
daily at the college, and closeted, with locked
doors, in his laboratory till unusually late hours.
Still more remarkable, he had directed the
servants to light none of the stoves in his rooms
on those days; and yet on each of them he had
fires laid and lighted by himself, and these were
of more than ordinary heat and intensity,
especially one in the assay furnace. The key of one
door, which led to a sink attached to the
laboratory, and which usually hung upon a particular
nail, was every day carried home by Dr. Webster.
It was also remembered that on Saturday,
which at the college was the ordinary day for a
general cleaning and dusting, the servants
presented themselves as usual to perform their
work, but they could not get admittance to Dr.
Webster's rooms, and that he spoke through
the closed door, and ordered them away.

Meantime, during these few dreadful days of
anxiety and alarm, Dr. Webster, though later
in returning home, spent his evenings as usual
in Cambridge, took his daughters to parties,
played whist with his friends, mingled in the
customary hospitalities of the place, sympathised
with the general consternation of the society,
and compared his own conjectures with those of
others as to the fate of that friend who had so
suddenly and so mysteriously disappeared from
amongst them.

III.

But there was one individual who, during this
period of terror and perplexity, kept his eye
with more than ordinary steadiness upon Dr.
Webster, and from the first strongly suspected
him to be the murderer of Dr. Parkman. This
was Ephraim Littlefield, the janitor of the
Medical College, who had charge of the building,
and who, with his wife and servants,
occupied apartments in the basement. Littlefield
was stirred by the reproach flung upon the
institution that the missing man had been seen to
enter its door, and was never known to leave it
again. Every time he appeared in the streets
he was disquieted by innuendoes of the people,
that if the body were found anywhere, it would
be found there. He narrowly watched the
movements of Dr. Webster; and, familiar as he
was with all the economy and arrangements of
the institution and its professors, he could not
be otherwise than surprised by his
exceptional acts, and by his mysterious closetings
with bolted doors at unaccustomed hours.
Littlefield was dissatisfied with the imperfect
and superficial examination which the
authorities had on two occasions made in Dr.
Webster's apartments. He recalled that, although
the Cambridge carrier had always theretofore
taken parcels for the lecturer into the
laboratory, orders were given at this particular
time that he should deposit them outside the
door. He had been present by accident at one
of the incriminatory interviews between Dr.
Webster and Dr. Parkman, when the latter
taxed him with fraud, and threatened him
"unless something was settled to-morrow."
He remembered that about the same time Dr.
Webster made curious inquiries of him as to
how access could be had to the vault
beneath the anatomy school, into which were
thrown the human remains from the dissecting-
tables. He asked if a light would burn in that
vault so as to exhibit its contents, but the
janitor told him no, for he had recently hung a
negro's head there to macerate, but the cord
rotted and the skull fell, and when he tried to
raise it the foul air extinguished the lamp.

Littlefield called to mind that on Thursday, the
day before the Friday, Dr. Webster had asked
him to procure him from the hospital a jar full
of human blood, on which he meant, he said, to
experiment in the course of to-morrow's
lecture; but, as no patients were that day bled,
the janitor was unable to procure it. It
occurred to the porter, had blood been discovered
in the laboratory during the search, how easy
it would have been to assert that it was the
same blood that had been brought there from