When this was done he looked in the glass, and started back with a shout. "By Jove!" cried he, after a moment; "I thought all was lost. I thought my own reflection was another man's! I am already another man. I feel it in every fibre. No one who knew me, and thinks I am dead, would recognise me. I might walk down the streets of Daneford to-morrow, and talk about my own sad end to my most intimate friend, and he would not recognise me. The Daneford Bank would open an account for me to-morrow in the name of Grey, and observe no likeness between their new customer and their old master. I am a new man already. I feel new blood in all my veins, new sinews in all my limbs; the nightmare of the past is vanishing; I shall sleep now of nights, and whistle once more while I dress of mornings. Ten thousand times better this feeling than all the pomp my ambition longed for with the canker and the care."
He took from the pocket of the coat he had removed a small packet, thinking: "All I want is the money. Twenty thousand pounds will be a large fortune in either Spain or Italy."
He threw the clothes he had worn on the bed, opened the cupboard, and took out one after another four cans. Two of these he emptied over his own bed, one on the floor and furniture, and one on the landing and first flight of the stairs. Turpentine!
He then threw the four cans on the bed, wrenched off the gas-brackets and set fire to the gas at the ends of the broken pipes.
He cast one hasty glance round.
"All right!"
He struck a match and held it to the saturated bed.
A little spirt of flame shot out of the counterpane to the match. The spirt of flame then fell back and spread slowly until it formed a spire as large as a pine-cone.
Grey backed to the door and seized the handle.
From that cone flashed twenty javelins of light this way and that. The air of the room sobbed, and a solid mass of white flame stood up over that bed.