nt was found dead, in the lack of any other clue, people
thought of Lansing. He realized that this was so, and remained silent as
to a fact which otherwise he would have testified to at the inquest,
but which he feared might now imperil him. He had been at Austin Flint's
house the night of the murder, and might have committed it, so far
as opportunity was concerned. In reality, the motive of his visit was
anything but murderous. Deeply chagrined by the scandal of the fight,
he had gone to Flint to apologize, and to make up their quarrel. But he
knew very well that nobody would believe that this was his true object
in seeking his enemy secretly by night, while the admission of the visit
would complete a circumstantial evidence against him stronger than had
often hanged men. He believed that no one but the dead man knew of the
call, and that it would never be found out. He had not told his wife of
it at the time, and still less afterward, on account of the anxiety she
would feel at his position.

Two weeks passed, and he was beginning to breathe freely in the
assurance of safety, when, like a thunderbolt from a cloud that seems to
have passed over, the catastrophe came. A friend met him on the street
one day, and warned him to escape while he could. It appeared that he
had been seen to enter Flint's house that night. His concealment of the
fact had been accepted as corroborating evidence of his guilt, and the
police, who had shadowed him from the first, might arrest him at any
moment. The conviction that he was guilty, which the friend who told him
this evidently had, was a terrible comment on the desperateness of
his position. He walked home as in a dream. His wife had gone out to
a neighbor's. His little boy came to him, and clambered on his knee.
"Papa, what makes your face so wet?" he asked, for there were great
drops on his forehead. Then his wife came in, her face white, her eyes
full of horror. "Oh, John!" she exclaimed. "They say you were at Mr.
Flint's that night, and they are going to arrest you. Oh, John, what
does it mean? Why don't you speak? I shall go mad, if you do not speak.
You were not there! Tell me that you were not there!" The ghastly face
he raised to hers might well have seemed to confess everything.

At least she seemed to take it so, and in a fit of hysterical weeping
sank to the floor, and buried her face in her hands upon a chair. The
children, alarmed at the scene, began to cry. It was growing