. To-night at 10 30. Do not fail me. I shall never marry any
one but you."

Was that all? I had an indistinct remembrance of having added some wild
and incoherent words of passionate affection affixed to her name. _Her
name_! But it may be that in the hurry and flurry of the moment, these
terms of endearment simply passed through my mind and found no expression
on paper. I could not be sure, any more than I could be positive from the
half glimpse I got of these lines, which portion had been burned
off,--the top in which the word _train_ occurred, or the final words,
emphasising a time of meeting and my determination to marry no one but
the person addressed. The first gone, the latter might take on any
sinister meaning. The latter gone, the first might prove a safeguard,
corroborating my statement that an errand had taken me into town.

I was oppressed by the uncertainty of my position. Even if I carried off
this detail successfully, others of equal importance might be awaiting
explanation. My poor, maddened, guilt-haunted girl had made the
irreparable mistake of letting this note of mine fly unconsumed up the
chimney, and she might have made others equally incriminating. It would
be hard to find an alibi for her if suspicion once turned her way. She
had not met me at the train. The unknown but doubtless easily-to-be-found
man who had handed me her note could swear to that fact.

Then the note itself! I had destroyed it, it is true, but its phrases
were so present to my mind--had been so branded into it by the terrors of
the tragedy which they appeared to foreshadow, that I had a dreadful
feeling that this man's eye could read them there. I remember that under
the compelling power of this fancy, my hand rose to my brow outspread and
concealing, as if to interpose a barrier between him and them. Is my
folly past belief? Possibly. But then I have not told you the words of
this fatal communication. They were these--innocent, if she were
innocent, but how suggestive in the light of her probable guilt:

"I cannot. Wait till to-morrow. Then you will see the depth of my love
for you--what I owe you--what I owe Adelaide."

I should see!

I was seeing.

Suddenly I dropped my hand; a new thought had come to me. Had Carmel been
discovered on the road leading from this place?

You perceive that by this time I had become the prey of every threatening
possibility; even of that which made the present a nightmare from which I
s