Felt. It is a question that will never be answered, but I know
that he comforts himself with the supposition, and allows the trembling
hope to pass, at times, across his troubled spirit, that in the
bitterness of those last hours some touch of the divine mercy may have
moved her soul and made her fitter for his memory to dwell upon.

The letter I afterward read. It was as follows:

TO THE MAN WHO GAVE ALL, BORE ALL, AND REAPED NOTHING BUT SUFFERING:

I am not worthy to write you, even with the
prospect of death before me. But an influence I
do not care to combat drives me to make you, of
all men, the confidant of my remorse.

I did not perish sixteen years ago in the
Hudson River. I lived to share in and profit
by a crime that has left an indelible stain
upon my life and an ineffaceable darkness
within my soul. You know, or soon will know,
what that crime was and how we prospered in it.
Daring as it was dreadful, I heard its fearful
details planned by his lips, without a shudder,
because I was mad in those days, mad for
wealth, mad for power, mad for adventure. The
only madness I did not feel was love. This I
say to comfort a pride that must have been
sorely wounded in those days, as sorely wounded
as your heart.

Edwin Urquhart could make my eyes shine and my
blood run swiftly, but not so swiftly as to
make me break my troth with you, had he not
sworn to me that through him I should gain what
moved me more than any man's love. How he was
to accomplish this I could not see in the
beginning, and was so little credulous of his
being able to keep his oaths that I let myself
be drawn by you almost to the church door.

But I got no further. There in the crowd he
stood with a command in his eyes which forbade
any further advance. Though I comprehended
nothing then, I obeyed his look and went back,
for my heart was not in any marriage, and it
was in the hopes to which his looks seemed to
point. Later he told me what those hopes were.
He had been down to Long Island, and, while
there, had chanced to hear in some tavern of
the Happy-Go-Lucky Inn and its secret chamber,
and he saw, or thought he saw, how he could