Italy shook her head, but she thought thrillingly: “He must have told his mother of his love for me, he must have left me word to cherish his memory until we meet in heaven.” Mrs. Murray thrust her hand beneath the pillow and dragged out a letter. She flung it with a groan into the girl’s lap, then buried her convulsed face in the pillows, her form heaving with long, shuddering sighs. The letter rustled in Italy’s trembling white hand, the wind outside gathered itself for a stupendous effort, and roared and shrieked around the gables like a company of demons, the hollow waves boomed on the shore like ghostly voices of the drowned, but Italy heard and saw nothing else but the letter in her hand, the white page with the black words on its whiteness, each individual letter seeming like a little black fiend setting an awful seal of shame on the whiteness of Francis Murray’s life. For the letter was a confession of crime. At last Mrs. Vale was vindicated, at last the world that had wronged her by its hideous judgments would behold her life truly as that of a martyr. That tender white hand had never driven home the dagger in the breast of the husband she loved. No, it was a man’s strong hand--the hand of his impecunious kinsman, Francis Murray. Maddened by a refusal of a monetary favor, and envious of the rich man’s wealth, he had struck an impulsive blow that stretched Ronald Vale dead at his feet. Then the poor young man on whom the sun had set in sullen, desperate poverty found himself at day-dawn a millionaire with his hideous crime unsuspected and the finger of suspicion pointing at his victim’s beautiful young wife. It was a story to make the angels weep, the story of that young wife’s martyrdom, and briefly told as it was by the dying criminal, it moved the heart to alternate horror and pity--horror for the man, pity for the woman robbed at one fell stroke of all life’s joys except her dark-eyed child. And at the end of this dark confession of sin ran the closing sentence: “Mother, I send this to you because I know not if Italy Vale was saved or not from the wreck that caused my death. If she be alive send for her and let her read this letter and clear her mother’s memory from all stain. If she be dead this duty falls on you. Fail not to perform it under penalty of the solemn curse of your erring son, now passing to his last dread account with Heaven. FRANCIS MURRAY.” She sat like one turned to stone with her staring eyes fixed on that name--that name written with a trembling, dying hand, yet unmistakably the chirography of Francis Murray. Oh, fiend, fiend! And there lay his proud mother dying of horror at the revelation of his monstrous crime!