en, as the valet had left them some hours
before, on making the astounding discovery, which the partially admitted
light revealed. The corpse lay in the silk-embroidered dressing gown, and
other habiliments, which Sir Wynston had worn, while taking his ease in
his chamber, on the preceding night. The coverlet was partially dragged
over it. The mouth was gaping, and filled with clotted blood; a wide gash
was also visible in the neck, under the ear; and there was a thickening
pool of blood at the bedside, and quantities of blood, doubtless from
other wounds, had saturated the bedclothes under the body. There lay Sir
Wynston, stiffened in the attitude in which the struggle of death had
left him, with his stern, stony face, and dim, terrible gaze turned up.

Charles looked breathlessly for more than a minute upon this mute and
unchanging spectacle, and then silently suffered the curtain to fall back
again, and stepped, with the light tread of awe, again to the door. There
he turned back, and pausing for a minute, said, in a whisper, to the
attendant--

"And Merton did this?"

"Troth, I'm afeard he did, sir," answered the man, gloomily.

"And has made his escape?" continued Charles.

"Yes, sir; he stole away in the night-time," replied the servant, "after
the murder was done" (and he glanced fearfully toward the bed); "God
knows where he's gone."

"The villain!" muttered Charles; "but what was his motive? why did he do
all this--what does it mean?"

"I don't know exactly, sir, but he was very queer for a week and more
before it," replied the man; "there was something bad over him for a
long time."

"It is a terrible thing," said Charles, with a profound sigh; "a terrible
and shocking occurrence."

He hesitated again at the door, but his feelings had sustained a terrible
revulsion at sight of the corpse, and he was no longer disposed to
prosecute his purposed examination of the chamber and its contents; with
a view to conjecturing the probable circumstances of the murder.

"Observe, Hughes, that I have moved nothing in the chamber from the place
it occupied when we entered," he said to the servant, as they withdrew.

He locked the door, and as he passed through the hall, on his return, he
encountered his father, and, restoring the key, said--

"I could not stay there; I am almost sorry I have seen it; I am
overpowered; what a determined, ferocious murder it was; the place is all
in a pool of gore; he must have r