From some cause she appeared unhappy and one of the maids of the hotel, who entered the room several times during the afternoon, declared she found Bessie weeping bitterly, but the next morning she seemed to have recovered her cheerfulness and gave the maid a handsome present, telling her that she and her husband had not been very happy for some time past but that they were entirely reconciled and were going out in the woods to spend the day. Lunch was prepared for them at the hotel. They were seen by twenty people to cross the public bridge over Cypress Bayou, within a hundred yards of the business portion of the city. The writer himself, returning from a ride, met them within a hundred yards of the bridge and noticed them only sufficiently to note that they were strangers, fashionably dressed and that the woman was very beautiful. The couple strolled leisurely along for half a mile on the other side of the bridge, then taking a by path plunged into the forest, climbed a hill, almost within stone’s throw of the public thoroughfare, and within rifle shot of the city itself. They had their lunch and doubtless the man who planned one of the most cowardly murders ever perpetrated whispered words of love and loyalty into the ears of the poor woman, only too glad to receive them. Their lunch was spread on a large rock; it was almost an ideal spot, deep in the heart of the woodland, surrounded by the songs of birds and the musical ripple of the running water. In the shade of the giant oak and ironwood they whiled away the midday hours. Seated on the moss grown rock, the woman out the initials of her husband in the soft bark of a curly maple and with a fond woman’s foolish heart treasured the false vows of her brutal lord in whose inhuman breast lurked a purpose so dark, so deadly that the fiends of hell must have shuddered at its import. While the foolish heart of the woman fluttered with hope and thrilled with fond desires, the hand of the master murderer of modern times, pushed the rim of a deadly revolver within an inch of her white temple, where rippling masses of sunny hair fell in clustering curls, and without a tremor sent a bullet crashing through her brain. The sound of a shot rang out on the evening air, reverberated from the hillside and died away in distant woods. The birds stopped midway their gladsome song, a tiny serpent of smoke rose above the tree tops and drifted with the winds, a frightened squirrel darted into its den, the sluggish river flowed smoothly at the base of the hill, and a dead white face stared at the winter sky. With fiendish deliberation the uxorcide removed the costly jewels from the dead form, with one hand the murderer of Bessie Rothchild hurled a hopeless woman’s soul into eternity and with the other stripped her lifeless body of the poor gaudy ornaments, which were badges of her shame, the price of a woman’s sin.