father's room.

I took out the letter, opened it with trembling fingers, and looked
through the cramped, closely-written pages for the signature.

It was "ROBERT MANNION."

V.

Mannion! I had never suspected that the note shown to me at North Villa
might have come from him. And yet, the secrecy with which it had been
delivered; the person to whom it was addressed; the mystery connected
with it even in the servant's eyes, all pointed to the discovery which
I had so incomprehensibly failed to make. I had suffered a letter, which
might contain written proof of her guilt, to be taken, from under my own
eyes, to Margaret Sherwin! How had my perceptions become thus strangely
blinded? The confusion of my memory, the listless incapacity of all my
faculties, answered the question but too readily, of themselves.

"Robert Mannion!" I could not take my eyes from that name: I still held
before me the crowded, closely-written lines of his writing, and delayed
to read them. Something of the horror which the presence of the man
himself would have inspired in me, was produced by the mere sight of his
letter, and that letter addressed to _me._ The vengeance which my
own hands had wreaked on him, he was, of all men the surest to repay.
Perhaps, in these lines, the dark future through which his way and mine
might lie, would be already shadowed forth. Margaret too! Could he write
so much, and not write of _her?_ not disclose the mystery in which the
motives of _her_ crime were still hidden? I turned back again to the
first page, and resolved to read the letter. It began abruptly, in the
following terms:--

"St. Helen's Hospital.

"You may look at the signature when you receive this, and may be tempted
to tear up my letter, and throw it from you unread. I warn you to read
what I have written, and to estimate, if you can, its importance to
yourself. Destroy these pages afterwards if you like--they will have
served their purpose.

"Do you know where I am, and what I suffer? I am one of the patients
of this hospital, hideously mutilated for life by your hand. If I could
have known certainly the day of my dismissal, I should have waited to
tell you with my own lips what I now write--but I am ignorant of this.
At the very point of recovery I have suffered a relapse.

"You will silence any uneasy upbraidings of conscience, should you feel
them, by saying that I have deserved death at your hands. I