“I had failed to bring a magnifying-glass with me, but my eyes are phenomenally sharp. Knowing where to look, I was able to pick out enough words here and there in the lines composing the hair, to feel quite sure that my wife had neither deceived me nor been deceived as to certain directions being embodied there in writing. Shaken in my last lingering hope, but not yet quite convinced that these words pointed to outrageous crime, I flew next to the closet and drew out the fatal drawer. “You have been there and know what the place is, but no one but myself can ever realize what it was for me, still loving, still clinging to a wild inconsequent belief in my wife, to grope in that mouth of hell for the spring she had chattered about in her sleep, to find it, press it, and then to hear, down in the dark of the fearsome recess, the sound of something deadly strike against what I took to be the cushions of the old settle standing at the edge of the library hearthstone. “I think I must have fainted. For when I found myself possessed of sufficient consciousness to withdraw from that hole of death, the candle in the candelabrum was shorter by an inch than when I first thrust my head into the gap made by the removed drawers. In putting back the drawers I hit the candelabrum with my foot, upsetting it and throwing out the burning candle. As the flames began to lick the worm-eaten boarding of the floor a momentary impulse seized me to rush away and leave the whole place to burn. But I did not. With a sudden frenzy, I stamped out the flame, and then finding myself in darkness, groped my way downstairs and out. If I entered the library I do not remember it. Some lapses must be pardoned a man involved as I was.” “But the fact which you dismiss so lightly is an important one,” insisted the major. “We must know positively whether you entered this room or not.” “I have no recollection of doing so” “Then you can not tell us whether the little table was standing there, with the candelabrum upon it or—” “I can tell you nothing about it.” The major, after a long look at this suffering man, turned toward Miss Tuttle. “You must have loved your sister very much,” he sententiously remarked. She flushed and for the first time her eyes fell from their resting-place on Mr. Jeffrey’s face. “I loved her reputation,” was her quiet answer, “and—” The rest died in her throat. But we all—such of us, I mean, who were possessed of the least sensibility or insight, knew how that sentence sounded as finished in her heart “and I loved _him_ who asked this sacrifice of me.” Yet was her conduct not quite clear. “And to save that reputation you tied the pistol to her wrist?” insinuated the major.