He had sat down by the window, and was eagerly opening the roll of paper, and seeking the account of the murder. Mrs. Brookes paused by his side for a moment, laid her withered hand gently on his hair, and then left him. A moment after he started up from his chair, and cried out: "Good God! the man was Deane!" The shock of this discovery was extreme. Wholly unable as he had been to account for the coincidence which Mrs. Brookes's imperfect story (for, like most persons of her class, she was an unskilful narrator of facts) had unfolded to him, he had never supposed his connection with it real, and now he saw it all, and in a moment perceived the gravity of his situation. The nameless man whom he had seen so often, and yet known so slightly; concerning whom he had speculated often and carelessly; whom no one had recognized; whose singular dress the waiter at the tavern had described in his evidence; the date; all was conclusive. The man murdered was Deane. But who was the murderer? How was it that no one had recognized the body? With all his mysterious ways, in spite of the callous selfishness which had rendered him indifferent to companionship save in the mere pursuit of his pleasures, it seemed wonderful that no one should have been able to identify him. "There's Routh, now," said George to himself, "_he_ must have heard of the finding of the body, he must have read the description of the dress; he may have seen the man's fur coat before, though I never did. To be sure, he did not dine with us that day, but he knew where Deane dined and with whom. What can Routh have been about?" These and a thousand questions of a similar nature George Dallas put to himself, without finding any answer to them, without stilling the tumult in his mind. He tried to arrange the circumstances in their order of occurrence, and to think them out, but in vain; he could not do so yet: all was confusion and vague horror. He had not liked this man. Theirs had been the mere casual association of convenience and amusement--an association, perhaps, the foremost of all those which he was firmly determined never to renew; and yet he could not regard its dreadful ending with indifference. The life which had perverted George had not hardened him, and he could not readily throw off the impression created by the discovery that the man with whom he had joined in the pursuit of reckless and degrading pleasure had died a violent death within so short a time of their last meeting. When Mrs. Brookes came into the room again, the expression of the young man's face terrified her afresh.