conviction which was making a
turmoil in mind, heart, and conscience. Alas! there was but little more
to see. A pair of curling-irons lay on the hearth, but I had no sooner
lifted them than I dropped them with a shudder of unspeakable loathing,
only to start at the noise they made in striking the tiles. For it was
the self-same noise I had heard when listening from below. These tongs,
set up against the side of the fireplace had been jarred down by the
forcible shutting of the large front door, and no man other than myself
was in the house, or had been in the house; only the two women. But the
time when this discovery would have brought comfort was passed. Better a
hundred times that a man--I had almost said any man--should have been
with them here, than that they should be closeted together in a spot so
secluded, with rancour and cause for complaint in one heart, and a
biting, deadly flame in the other, which once reaching up must from its
very nature leave behind it a corrosive impress. I saw,-I felt,--but I
did not desist from my investigations. A stick or two still smouldered on
the hearthstone. In the ashes lay some scattered fragments of paper which
crumbled at my touch. On the floor in front I espied only a stray
hair-pin; everything else was in place throughout the room except the
cushions and that horror on the lounge, waiting the second look I had so
far refrained from giving it.

That look I could no longer withhold. I must know the depth of the gulf
over which I hung. I must not wrong with a thought one who had smiled
upon me like an angel of light--a young girl, too, with the dew of
innocence on her beauty to every eye but mine and only not to mine
within--shall I say ten awful minutes? It seemed ages,--all of my life
and more. Yet that lovely breast had heaved not so many times since I
looked upon her as a deified mortal, and now two small spots on another
woman's pulseless throat had drawn a veil of blood over that beauty, and
given to a child the attributes of a Medusa. Yet hope was not quite
stilled. I would look again and perhaps discover that my own eyes had
been at fault, that there were no marks, or if marks, not just the ones
my fancy had painted there.

Turning, I let my glance fall first on the feet. I had not noted them
before, and I was startled to see that the arctics in which they were
clad were filled all around with snow. She had walked then, as the other
was walking now; she, who detested