“It will kill him,” she groaned in a deep inward voice. Then, with a certain forced haste and in a tone of surprise which to my ear had not quite a natural ring, she called aloud on her who could no longer either listen or answer: “Oh, Veronica, Veronica! What cause had you for death? And why do we find you lying here in a spot you so feared and detested?” “Don’t you know?” insinuated the captain, with a mild persuasiveness, such as he was seldom heard to use. “Do you mean that you can not account for your sister’s violent end, you, who have lived with her—or so I have been told—ever since her marriage with Mr. Jeffrey?” “Yes.” Keen and clear the word rang out, fierce in its keenness and almost too clear to be in keeping with the half choked tones with which she added: “I know that she was not happy, that she never has been happy since the shadow which this room suggests fell upon her marriage. But how could I so much as dream that her dread of the past or her fear of the future would drive her to suicide, and in this place of all places! Had I done so—had I imagined in the least degree that she was affected to this extent—do you think that I would have left her for one instant alone? None of us knew that she contemplated death. She had no appearance of it; she laughed when I—” What had she been about to say? The captain seemed to wonder, and after waiting in vain for the completion of her sentence, he quietly suggested: “You have not finished what you had to say, Miss Tuttle.” She started and seemed to come back from some remote region of thought into which she had wandered. “I don’t know—I forget,” she stammered, with a heart-broken sigh. “Poor Veronica! Wretched Veronica! How shall I ever tell _him!_ How, how, can we ever prepare _him!_” The captain took advantage of this reference to Mr. Jeffrey to ask where that gentleman was. The young lady did not seem eager to reply, but when pressed, answered, though somewhat mechanically, that it was impossible for her to say; Mr. Jeffrey had many friends with any one of whom he might be enjoying a social evening. “But it is far past midnight now,” remarked the captain. “Is he in the habit of remaining out late?” “Sometimes,” she faintly admitted. “Two or three times since his marriage he has been out till one.” Were there other causes for the young bride’s evident disappointment and misery besides the one intimated? There certainly was some excuse for thinking so. Possibly some one of as may have shown his doubts in this regard, for the woman before us suddenly broke forth with this vehement assertion: “Mr. Jeffrey was a loving husband to my sister. A _very_ loving husband,” she emphasized. Then, growing desperately pale, she added, “I have never known a better man,” and stopped. Some hidden anguish in this cry, some self-consciousness in this pause, suggested to me a possibility which I was glad to see ignored by the captain in his next question.