I write this down calmly, now; but it was awful at the time. I think I must have read on mechanically, expecting something sad, and about Harry likewise; I soon guessed that bad man at Salisbury must have been poor Harry--but I never guessed anything near the truth till I came to the words "I _murdered_ him." To suppose one feels a great blow acutely at the instant is a mistake--it stuns rather than wounds. Especially when it comes in a letter, read in quiet and alone, as I read Max's letter that night. And--as I remember afterwards seeing in some book, and thinking how true it was--it is strange how soon a great misery grows familiar. Waking up from the first few minutes of total bewilderment, I seemed to have been aware all these twenty years that my Max killed Harry. O Harry, my brother, whom I never knew--no more than any stranger in the street, and the faint memory of whom was mixed with an indefinite something of wickedness, anguish, and disgrace to us all, if I felt not as I ought, then or afterwards, forgive me. If, though your sister, I thought less of you dead than of my living Max--my poor, poor Max, who had borne this awful burthen for twenty years--Harry, forgive me! Well, I knew it--as an absolute fact and certainty--though as one often feels with great personal misfortunes, at first I could not realize it. Gradually I became fully conscious what an overwhelming horror it was, and what a fearful retributive justice had fallen upon papa and us all. For there were some things I had not myself known till this spring, when Penelope, in the fullness of her heart at leaving us, talked to me a good deal of old childish days, and especially about Harry. He was a spoiled child. His father never said him nay in anything--never, from the time when he sat at table, in his own ornamental chair, and drank champagne out of his own particular glass, lisping toasts that were the great amusement of everybody. He never knew what contradiction was, till, at nineteen, he fell in love, and wanted to get married, and would have succeeded, for they eloped, (as I believe papa and Harry's mother had done), but papa prevented them in time. The girl, some village lass, but she might have had a heart nevertheless, broke it, and died. Then Harry went all wrong. Penelope remembers, how, at times, a shabby, dissipated man used to meet us children out walking, and kiss us and the nurserymaids all round, saying he was our brother Harry. Also, how he used to lie in wait for papa coming out of church, follow him into his library, where, after fearful scenes of quarrelling, Harry would go away jauntily, laughing to us, and bowing to mamma, who always showed him out and shut the door upon him with a face as white as a sheet.