There was not a word spoken by the searchers. Their eyes told them all that was necessary to convince them of the identity of those who lay before them. Nor, when Halliday took up a paper which lay at the head of Blair, did he think it necessary to make any observation of surprise at what was in keeping with what they saw. “Oh, read,” said Mrs Blair, as she gasped in the midst of her agony. Halliday, holding up the paper so as to receive the light, read as follows:-- “Whoever you may be, man or woman, who first discovers the bodies of me and her who lies by my side will please, as he or she hopes for mercy, deliver this paper either to Mr Patrick Halliday of Peddie’s Land, or Mrs Archibald Blair in Writers’ Court, that they may take the means of getting us decently interred. Julia Halliday and I, Archibald Blair, met and looked and loved. These few words contain the secret of our misfortune, and must be the excuse of our crime in taking away our lives. Our love was too strong to be quelled by resolution, too sacred to be corrupted by coarse enjoyment of the senses, too hopeless to be borne amidst the impediments of our mutual obligations to our spouses. We felt and believed that it was only our mortal bodies that belonged to our partners, our spirits were ours and ours alone by that decree which made the soul, with its sympathies and its elections, before ever the world was, or marriage, which is only a convention of man’s making. We loved, we sinned not, yet we were unhappy, because we could not fulfil the obligations of affection to those we had sworn at the altar to love and honour. Often have we torn ourselves from each other with vows on our lips of mutual avoidance, but these efforts were vain. We could not live estranged, and we flew again to each other’s arms, again to vow, again to meet, again to be blessed, again to be tortured. This life was unendurable; and, left to the alternative of parting or dying, we selected the latter. The poison was bought by me in two separate vials. As I write, Julia holds hers in her hands, and smiles as she is about to swallow the drug. We have resolved to lie down face to face, so as to be able to look into each other’s eyes and watch jealously Death as he drags us slowly from each other. I have now swallowed my draft, smiling the while in Julia’s face. She does the same. The pen trembles in my hand. Farewell, my wife: Julia mutters, ‘Farewell, my husband.’ Against neither have we ever sinned. “ARCHIBALD BLAIR.” [Illustration] The Story of Mary Brown.