hair, like life in excrements,
Starts up and stands on end.

* * * * *

Whereon do you look?

_Hamlet._ On him! On him! Look you how pale he glares!
His form and cause conjoined, preaching to stones,
Would make them capable. Do not look upon me;
Lest, with this piteous action, you convert
My stern effects! then what I have to do
Will want true color; tears, perchance, for blood.--HAMLET.

THAT my readers may understand even better than Byrd and Hickory how it
was that Imogene came to write this letter, I must ask them to consider
certain incidents that had occurred in a quarter far removed from the
eye of the detectives.

Mr. Orcutt's mind had never been at rest concerning the peculiar
attitude assumed by Imogene Dare at the time of Mrs. Clemmens' murder.
Time and thought had not made it any more possible for him to believe
now than then that she knew any thing of the matter beyond what appeared
to the general eye: but he could not forget the ring. It haunted him.
Fifty times a day he asked himself what she had meant by claiming as her
own a jewel which had been picked up from the floor of a strange house
at a time so dreadful, and which, in despite of her explanations to him,
he found it impossible to believe was hers or ever could have been hers?
He was even tempted to ask her; but he never did. The words would not
come. Though they faltered again and again upon his lips, he could not
give utterance to them; no, though with every passing day he felt that
the bond uniting her to him was growing weaker and weaker, and that if
something did not soon intervene to establish confidence between them,
he would presently lose all hope of the treasure for the possession of
which he was now ready to barter away half the remaining years of his
life.

Her increasing reticence, and the almost stony look of misery that now
confronted him without let or hindrance from her wide gray eyes, were
not calculated to reassure him or make his future prospects look any
brighter. Her pain, if pain it were, or remorse, if remorse it could be,
was not of a kind to feel the influence of time; and, struck with
dismay, alarmed in spite of himself, if not for her reason at least for
his own, he watched her from day to day, feeling that now he would give
his life not merely to possess her, but to understand her and the secret
tha