e act returned to enforce its consummation. With a guilty
eye and eager hands, he searched the contents of this tiny repository of
the fair Norman's written secrets.

"Ha! the very thing," he muttered, as he detected the identical letter
which he himself had handed to Mademoiselle de Barras but a few days
before. "The handwriting struck me, ill-disguised; I thought I knew it;
we shall see."

He had opened the letter; it contained but a few lines: he held his
breath while he read it. First he grew pale, then a shadow came over his
face, and then another, and another, darker and darker, shade upon shade,
as if an exhalation from the pit was momentarily blackening the air about
him. He said nothing; there was but one long, gentle sigh, and in his
face a mortal sternness, as he folded the letter again, replaced it, and
locked the desk.

Of course, when Mademoiselle de Barras returned from her accustomed
walk, she found everything in her room, to all appearances, undisturbed,
and just as when she left it. While this young lady was making her
toilet for the evening, and while Sir Wynston Berkley was worrying
himself with conjectures as to whether Marston's evil looks, when he
encountered him that morning in the passage, existed only in his own
fancy, or were, in good truth, very grim and significant realities,
Marston himself was striding alone through the wildest and darkest
solitudes of his park, haunted by his own unholy thoughts, and, it may
be, by those other evil and unearthly influences which wander, as we
know, "in desert places." Darkness overtook him, and the chill of night,
in these lonely tracts. In his solitary walk, what fearful company had
he been keeping! As the shades of night deepened round him, the sense of
the neighborhood of ill, the consciousness of the foul fancies or which,
where he was now treading, he had been for hours the sport, oppressed
him with a vague and unknown terror; a certain horror of the thoughts
which had been his comrades through the day, which he could not now
shake off, and which haunted him with a ghastly and defiant pertinacity,
scared, while they half-enraged him. He stalked swiftly homewards, like
a guilty man pursued.

Marston was not perfectly satisfied, though very nearly, with the
evidence now in his possession. The letter, the stolen perusal of which
had so agitated him that day, bore no signature; but, independently of
the handwriting, which seemed, spite of the constra