Then there were inquiries to be held, and a great deal of elaborate fuss and formality to be gone through before the bodies of my poor friend and his crazy assailant could be laid quietly to rest. I sent the two widowed ladies away to Scarborough to recover from the effects of the torturing interrogatories of high-dried Scotch functionaries and gave myself up to a week of the most dismal wretchedness I ever remember to have endured, until the half-dozen judicial individuals who questioned me at various times and in various ways concerning details, of most of which I was entirely ignorant, succeeded in reducing me to a state of abject imbecility in which I answered whatever they pleased, and went very near to implicating myself in the double catastrophe which was the subject of the inquiry. A tragic occurrence must always have for the commonplace mind an element of mystery; if that element is not afforded by the circumstances of the case, it must be introduced by conjecture and ingenious cross-questioning of witnesses. Therefore, when at last the 'inquiry' was ended, and victim and assailant were both buried in Glenmuick churchyard amid the stolid interest of a little crowd of Highland women and children, I found that I had become the object of a morbid curiosity and horror as the central figure of what had already become a very ugly story. I suppose that Fabian's death, the terrible circumstances which surrounded it, and the barrier they formed between myself and Babiole, combined to make me more sensitive than of old. It is certain that popular opinion, about which I had never before cared one straw, now began to affect me strangely; that my solitude became loneliness, and although the old wander-fever burned in me no longer, I began to feel that the mountains oppressed me, and the prospect of being snowed up with my books and my beasts, as I had been many times before, lowered in my horizon like a fear of imprisonment. I had heard nothing from Babiole except through her mother, whose letters were filled with minute accounts of the paralysing effect her husband's death seemed to have had upon the younger lady. These tidings struck me with dismay! I began to feel that I had underestimated the effect that such a shock would have on a keenly sensitive nature, and to fear that his tragic death had perhaps done more to reinstate Fabian in the place he had first held in her heart than years of penitent devotion could have done. This conjecture became almost conviction when, just as I had found a pretext on which to visit the ladies, I received a letter from Babiole herself which struck all my hopes and plans to the ground. It was written in such a constrained manner that the carefully-chosen expressions of gratitude and affection sounded cold and formal; while the purport of the letter stood out as precise and clear as a sentence of death to me. She was going away. She found it impossible to impose longer upon my generosity, and she had obtained