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.
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