window, muttering to herself like a mad thing. God alone knows what she meant to do. She wanted to make my crime known, to bring the train to a standstill, to have me arrested then and there. While she stood wavering on that narrow ledge, her life hanging by a thread, the train rounded the curve and passed on to the viaduct. The stony gorge was below, deep and narrow, like an open grave—tempting me—tempting me as Satan tempts his own. One sudden movement of my arm, and all was over. I had held her, for the first few moments. I had tried to save her. Had she been reasonable, I would have saved her. But there was no middle course. Ruin, unutterable ruin for me, or death for her. One motion of my arm, and she was gone. Light as a feather, the frail little figure fluttered down the gorge. Another minute, and the train stopped. I had my railway-key ready before the stoppage, and did not lose an instant in getting along the off-side of the line back to the compartment I had left. Every head without exception was turned towards the side on which the girl had fallen. The only witness of my crime had been destroyed, and my letters were safe in my own keeping, to be burned at the earliest opportunity."
"You burned them that night," said Dora. "I remember. And that tress of hair which you were looking at when I went into the library—"
"Was cut from Marie's head after death. The mother had placed it amongst those fatal letters. That night, after an interval of years, I touched the soft bright hair on which my hand had so often lingered in adoring love—that lovely hair which my hand had stained with blood."
There was no more to be told. An awful silence followed, a silence in which even Dora's sobs no longer sounded. There was a tearless agony which was deeper than that passion of tears.
She rose from her knees and turned towards Heathcote, white to the lips, icy cold, looking at him as if he had been a stranger, and as if she expected no more mercy from him than from a stranger.
"What are you going to do?" she asked. "You have come here alone; but perhaps there are people waiting outside—policemen, to take my husband to prison. He cannot run away from them; your victim is quite helpless."
"My victim? O Dora, how cruel that sounds from you!"
"Yes, I know," she said hurriedly. "I asked you to find out the mystery of that murder, and you have obeyed me. My husband—my husband an assassin!" she cried, flinging her clasped hands above her head in an access of despair; "my husband, whom I believed in as the noblest and best of men. He was tempted to blackest sin—tempted by the madness of jealousy, wrought upon afterwards by a sudden panic. He was not a despicable sinner—not like the man who poisons his friend, or
