“You know! you know! I heard a pistol-shot from within, then a fall. I don’t remember anything else. They say I went wandering about town. Perhaps I did; it is all a blank to me—everything is a blank till the policeman said that my sister was dead and I learned for the first time that the shot I had heard in the Moore house was not the signal of his death, but hers. Had I been myself when at that library door,” she added, after a moment of silence, “I would have rushed in at the sound of that shot and have received my sister’s dying breath.” “Cora!” The cry was from Mr. Jeffrey, and seemed to be quite involuntary. “In the weeks during which we have been kept from speaking together I have turned all these events over in my mind till I longed for any respite, even that of the grave. But in all my thinking I never attributed this motive to your visit here. Will you forgive me?” There was a new tone in his voice, a tone which no woman could hear without emotion. “You had other things to think of,” she said, and her lips trembled. Never have I seen on the human face a more beautiful expression than I saw on hers at that moment; nor do I think Mr. Jeffrey had either, for as he marked it his own regard softened almost to tenderness. The major had no time for sentimentalities. Turning to Mr. Jeffrey, he said: “One more question before we send for the letter which you say will give us full insight into your wife’s crime. Do you remember what occurred on the bridge at Georgetown just before you came into town that night?” He shook his head. “Did you meet any one there?” “I do not know.” “Can you remember your state of mind?” “I was facing the future.” “And what did you see in the future?” “Death. Death for her and death for me! A crime was on her soul and she must die, and if she, then myself. I knew no other course. I could not summon the police, point out my bride of a fortnight and, with the declaration that she had been betrayed into killing a man, coldly deliver her up to justice. Neither could I live at her side knowing the guilty secret which parted us; or live anywhere in the world under this same consciousness. Therefore, I meant to kill myself before another sun rose. But she was more deeply stricken with a sense of her own guilt than I realized. When I returned home for the pistol which was to end our common misery I found that she had taken her punishment into her own hands. This strangely affected me, but when I found that, in doing this, she had remembered that I should have to face the world after she was gone, and so left a few lines for me to show in explanation of her act, my revolt against her received a check which the reading of her letter only increased. But the lines she thus wrote and left were not true lines. All her heart was mine, and if it was a wicked heart she has atoned—”