empting to imaging the reason for her
presence, I stood my ground and harkened till the heavy mahogany door
at the other end of the room began to swing in by jerks under the
faint and tremulous push of a terrified hand. Then there came
silence--a long silence--followed by a moan so agonized that I
realized that whatever was the cause of this panting woman's
presence here, it was due to no mere errand of curiosity. This
whetted my purpose. Anything done in this house was in a way done
to me; so I remained quiet and watched. But the sounds which now
and then came from the remote corner upon which my attention was
concentrated were very eloquent.

"I heard sighs and bitter groans, with now and then a murmured
prayer, broken by a low wailing, in which I caught the name of
Francis. And still, possibly on account of the utterance of this
name, I thought the woman near me to be Miss Tuttle, and even went
so far as to imagine the cause of her suffering if not the nature
of her retribution. Words succeeded cries and I caught phrases
expressive of fear and some sort of agonized hesitation. Once
these broken ejaculations were interrupted by a dull sound.
Something had dropped to the bare floor. We shall never know what
it was, but I have no doubt that it was the pistol, and that the
marks of dust to be found on the connecting ribbon were made by her
own fingers in taking it again in her hand. (You will remember
that these same fingers had but a few minutes previous groped their
way along the walls.) For her voice soon took a different tone,
and such unintelligible phrases as these could be heard issuing
from her partly paralyzed lips:

"'I must!--I can never meet his eye again alive. He would
despise-- Brave enough to--to--another's blood--coward--when--own.
Oh, God! forgive!' Then another silence during which I almost
made up my mind to interfere, then a loud report and a flash so
startling and unexpected that I recoiled, during which the room
leaped into sudden view--she too--Veronica--with baby face drawn
and set like a woman's--then darkness again and a heavy fall which
shook the floor, if not my hard old heart. The flash and that fall
enlightened me. I had just witnessed the suicide of the last Moore
saving myself; a suicide for which I was totally unprepared and one
which I do not yet understand."

I did not go over to her. She was as dead when she fell as she
ever would be. In the flash which lit every