ve just risen from bed, and I
even lay down, wrapped in my dressing-gown, and put out my light. I
almost wondered that I felt no greater resentment and rage at Hilyard,
yet my sense of justice precluded it. As well blame the tree around
which the poison vine creeps and clings. I looked deeper than would the
world, which doubtless, judging from the surface, would have condemned
him rather than her, had all been known. She of the Madonna face and the
angel smile, anything but wronged? Never! The world would have acquitted
her triumphantly had she committed all the sins of the Borgias. For
myself, alas! I had heard her own lips condemn her, when, led by wanton
recklessness, or the occult sense of sympathy, she had talked to her
cousin this afternoon. Hilyard? Yes, it had chanced to be Hilyard, but
she, and not he, was most to blame. Hers was not a sin wept over and
expiated by remorse and tears; it was the soul, the essence of being,
that was corrupt to the very core in her. Had madness seized me when I
listened? I know not. I know I lay calmly and quietly, certain only
that it was well she was to die, certain that, if this failed, she must
die in another way before night came again, pitying neither her nor
myself in the apathy which held me, believing myself only the instrument
of some mighty power which was directing me, and against whose will I
could not rebel, if I wished.

For some time I could hear my betrothed moving about in her room; then
all was quiet, and she had doubtless lain down to sleep. By the
moonlight that filled my room I consulted my watch after a little while,
feeling that I had lost all sense of time, and found that it was half
past twelve, and that we had been upstairs over an hour. I concluded it
would hardly be safe to open the door yet; she might not be asleep. For
another half hour I lay patiently waiting. My mind was not excited, and
I reviewed rather the trifling events of my few hours in the city than
what had transpired since.

At last I rose, and in the dead quiet I moved softly to the connecting
door. I knew that it was concealed in Amy's room by a heavy portiere,
and as it opened on my side, I had only to hide myself behind the
curtain's folds--as once before on that previous day, alas!--and,
unguessed by her, watch her at my ease.

The key moved gently in the lock; the lock yielded; a moment more and I
had pulled a tiny fold of the curtain aside, and commanded a full view
of the silen