The man who was nearest the hall, I at once accosted, but being now
close to him, I was shocked to see that both his hands were covered with
blood.

I drew back a little, and the man, passing downstairs, merely said in a
low tone, "Here's the servant, sir."

The servant had stopped on the stairs, confounded and dumb at seeing me.
He was rubbing his hands in a handkerchief, and it was steeped in blood.

"Jones, what is it? what has happened?" I asked, while a sickening
suspicion overpowered me.

The man asked me to come up to the lobby. I was beside him in a moment,
and, frowning and pallid, with contracted eyes, he told me the horror
which I already half guessed.

His master had made away with himself.

I went upstairs with him to the room--what I saw there I won't tell you.
He had cut his throat with his razor. It was a frightful gash. The two
men had laid him on the bed, and composed his limbs. It had happened, as
the immense pool of blood on the floor declared, at some distance
between the bed and the window. There was carpet round his bed, and a
carpet under his dressing-table, but none on the rest of the floor, for
the man said he did not like a carpet on his bedroom. In this sombre and
now terrible room, one of the great elms that darkened the house was
slowly moving the shadow of one of its great boughs upon this dreadful
floor.