hese later days, recalled her every word and look, felt again the
trembling of her hand--for him--on the Coupee, heard again the tremors
of her voice as she urged him to safety. And those sweet ingenuous
kisses she had given him! Yes, indeed, he had much to be grateful for,
if some things to cavil at, in fortune's dealings.

But, behind all his fair white thought of Nance, was always the black
background of the whole circumstances of the case, and the grim fact of
Tom Hamon's death, and he pondered this last with knitted brows from
every point of view, and strove in vain for a gleam of light on the
darkness.

Could the Doctor be mistaken, and was Tom's death the simple result of
his fall over the Coupee? The Doctor's pronouncement, however, seemed
to leave no loophole of hope there.

If not, then who had killed Tom, and why?

He could think of no one. He could imagine no reason for it.

Tom had been a bully at home, but outside he was on jovial terms with
his fellows--except only himself. He had to acknowledge to himself the
seeming justice of the popular feeling. If any man in Sark might, with
some show of reason, have been suspected of the killing of Tom Hamon, it
was himself.

Once, by reason of overmuch groping in the dark, an awful doubt came
upon him--was it possible that, in some horrible wandering of the mind,
of which he remembered nothing, he had actually done this thing? Done it
unconsciously, in some over-boiling of hot blood into the brain, which
in its explosion had blotted out every memory of what had passed?

It was a hideous idea, born of over-strain and overmuch groping after
non-existent threads in a blind alley.

He tried to get outside himself, and follow Stephen Gard that night and
see if that terrible thing could have been possible to him.

But he followed himself from point to point, and from moment to moment,
and accounted for himself to himself without any lapse whatever; unless,
indeed, his brain had played him false and he had gone out of the house
again after going into it, and followed Tom and struck him down.

With what? The Doctor said with some blunt instrument like a hammer.
Where could he have obtained it? What had he done with it?

The idea, while it lasted, was horrible. But he shook it off at last
and called himself a fool for his pains. He had never harboured thought
of murder in his life. He had detested Tom, but he had never gone the
length of wishing him dead. The wh