“I tell you, I don't believe you struck me, Ed! And you must remember, neither of us would have got out if you hadn't!” “You might have let me go!” said the other. “On the way down the Degenfall, perhaps!” rejoined uncle Edmund. “--I believe it was that blow brought me to my senses, and made me get out!” “Thank you, Ed!” said uncle Edward. Once more I write from the manuscript. “I said to myself he _must_ have got out! It could not be that I had drowned my own brother! Such a ghastly thing could not have been permitted! It was too terrible to be possible! “How, then, had we been living the last few months? What brothers had we been? Had we been loving one another? Had I been a neighbour to my nearest? Had I been a brother to my twin? Was not murder the natural outcome of it all? He that loveth not his brother is a murderer! If so, where the good of saving me from being in deed what I was in nature? I had cast off my brother for a treacherous woman! My very thought sickened within me. “My soul seemed to grow luminous, and understand everything. I saw my whole behaviour as it was. The scales fell from my inward eyes, and there came a sudden, total, and absolute revulsion in my conscious self--like what takes place, I presume, at the day of judgment, when the God in every man sits in judgment upon the man. Had the gate of heaven stood wide open, neither angel with flaming sword, nor Peter with the keys to dispute my entrance, I would have turned away from it, and sought the deepest hell. I loathed the woman and myself; in my heart the sealed fountain of old affection had broken out, and flooded it. “All the time this thinking went on, I was crawling slowly up the endless river toward the chalet, driven by a hope inconsistent with what I knew of my brother. What I felt, he, if he were alive, must be feeling also: how then could I say to myself that I should find him with her? It was the last dying hope that I had not killed him that thus fooled me. 'She will be warming him in her bosom!' I said. But at the very touch, the idea turned and presented its opposite pole. 'Good God!' I cried in my heart, 'how shall I compass his deliverance? Better he lay at the bottom of the fall, than lived to be devoured by that serpent of hell! I will go straight to the den of the monster, and demand my brother!'” But to see the eyes of uncle Edmund at this point of the story! “At last I approached the chalet. All was still. A handkerchief lay on the grass, white in the moonlight. I went up to it, hoping to find it my brother's. It was the lady's. I flung it from me like a filthy rag. “What was the passion worth which in a moment could die so utterly! “I turned to the house. I would tear him from her: he was mine, not hers!