my wife, I felt my hair
lift, as I asked myself these questions. There seemed to be but one
logical answer to the last, and it was this: A struggle followed by
death. The shoe fallen from her foot, the clothes found folded in her
room (my wife was never orderly), and the dimly blackened wrists which
were snow-white when she dealt the cards--all seemed to point to such
a conclusion. She may have died from heart-failure, but a struggle had
preceded her death, during which some man's strong fingers had been
locked about her wrists. And again the question rose, Whose?

"If any place was ever hated by mortal man that grotto was hated by me.
I loathed its walls, its floor, its every visible and invisible corner.
To linger there--to look--almost tore my soul from my body; yet I did
linger and did look and this is what I found by way of reward.

"Behind a projecting ledge of stone from which a tattered rug still
hung, I came upon two nails driven a few feet apart into a fissure of
the rock. I had driven those nails myself long before for a certain
gymnastic attachment much in vogue at the time, and on looking closer,
I discovered hanging from them the rope-ends by which I was wont to
pull myself about. So far there was nothing to rouse any but innocent
reminiscences. But when I heard the dog's low moan and saw him leap
at the curled-up ends, and nose them with an eager look my way, I
remembered the dark marks circling the wrists about which I had so often
clasped my mother's bracelets, and the world went black before me.

"When consciousness returned--when I could once more move and see and
think, I noted another fact. Cards were strewn about the floor, face up
and in a fixed order as if laid in a mocking mood to be looked upon by
reluctant eyes; and near the ominous half-circle they made, a cushion
from the lounge, stained horribly with what I then thought to be blood,
but which I afterwards found to be wine. Vengeance spoke in those ropes
and in the carefully spread-out cards, and murder in the smothering
pillow. The vengeance of one who had watched her corroding influence eat
the life out of my honour and whose love for our little Roger was such
that any deed which ensured his continued presence in the home appeared
not only warrantable but obligatory. Alas! I knew of but one person
in the whole world who could cherish feeling to this extent or possess
sufficient will power to carry her lifeless body back to the house and