was written too
plainly on your brow. The spirit of Honora Urquhart, breaking the bounds
of this room, has walked ever beside you, and I knew you from the first
moment that you strayed down this hall."

Broken sounds, unintelligible murmurings, were all that greeted me.

"You are punished," I went on, "in the misery of your daughter. Nemesis
has reached you. The blood of Honora Urquhart has called aloud from
these walls, and not yourself only, but the still viler being whose name
you have so falsely shared, must answer to man and God for the life you
so heartlessly sacrificed and the rights you so falsely usurped."

"Mercy!" came in one quick gasp from the crushed heap of humanity before
me.

But I was inexorable. I remembered Honora Urquhart's sweet face, and at
that moment could think of nothing else. So I went on.

"You have had years of triumph. You have borne your victim's name, worn
your victim's clothes, sported with your victim's money. And he, her
husband, has looked on and smiled. Day after day, month after month,
year after year, you have gone in and out before your friends,
unmolested and unafraid; but God's vengeance, though it halts, is sure
and keen. Across land and across water the memories of this room have
drawn you, and not content with awakening suspicion, you must make
suspicion certainty by moving a spring unknown even to myself, and
entering this spot, from which the bones of your victim were taken only
two months ago, Marah Leighton!"

Moved by the name, she stood up. Tottering and agonized with pain, but
firm once more and determined, she towered before me, her face turned
toward the room she had left, her hand lifted, her whole attitude that
of one listening.

"Hark!" she cried.

It was a knock, a faint, low, trembling knock that we heard, then the
word "Mamma" came in muffled accents from the hallway.

A convulsion crossed the countenance of the miserable woman before me.

"Oh, God! my daughter, my daughter!" she cried. And falling at my feet,
she groveled in anguish as she pleaded:

"Will you kill her? She knows nothing, suspects nothing. The whole
fifteen years of her life are pure. She is a flower. I love her--I love
her, though she looks like the woman I hated and killed. She bears her
name--why, I do not know--I could not call her anything else; she is my
living reproach, and yet I love her. Do you not see it was for her I
crossed the water, for her I plunged my living hand i