“This is addressed to you,” he said. “I found it on the table with other papers, and seeing the address, and fearing that if the jury laid eyes on it, they might insist on knowing its contents, I thrust it into my pocket and said nothing about it there. Read it at your leisure, while I smoke a cigar below.” He left me, and I opened the seal with a sense of misgiving and apprehension for which I could not easily account. The outer packet was addressed to myself. But the envelope contained several other papers, one of which was addressed to his father; another--a small billet, unsealed--bore the name of my wife upon it. “That,” I inly (sic) muttered, “she shall never read!” An instant after, I trembled with a convulsive horror, as the demon who had whispered in my ears so long, seemed to say, in mocking accents:-- “Shall not! Ha! ha! She can not! can not!” and then the fiend seemed to chuckle, and I remembered the insuppressible anguish of Othello's apostrophe, to make all its eloquence my own. I murmured audibly:-- “My wife! my wife! What wife?--I have no wife! Oh, insupportable--oh, heavy hour!” My eyes were blinded. My face sunk down upon the table, and a cold shiver shook my frame as if I had an ague. But I recovered myself when I remembered the wrongs I had endured--her guilt and the guilt of Edgerton. I clutched the papers--brushed the big drops from my forehead, and read. “Clifford, I save you guiltless of my death. You would be less happy were my blood upon your hands, for, though I deserve to die by them, I know your nature too well--to believe that you would enjoy any malignant satisfaction at the performance of so sad a duty. Still, I know that this is no atonement. I have simply ceased from persecuting you and the angelic woman, your wife. But how shall I atone for the tortures and annoyances of the past, inflicted upon you both? Never! never! I perish without hope of forgiveness, though, here, alone with God, in the extreme of mortal humility, I pray for it! “Perhaps, you know all. From what escaped you this morning, it would seem so. You knew of my madness when in C----; you know that it pursued you here. Nothing then remains for me to tell. I might simply say all is true; but that, in the confession of my guilt and folly, each particular act of sin demands its own avowal, as it must be followed by its own bitter agony and groan.