"Of Mrs. Melray the younger what shall I say? I confess that in many respects she is an enigma to me. I was scarcely prepared to find her so attractive as she really is. Beautiful she is not, and it would be a misnomer to apply the term to her, but her face is one which I should think that seven out of every ten men would find singularly fascinating, in addition to which there is a strange but indefinable charm about her personality, which even I, one of her own sex, find it impossible wholly to resist. She is still curiously girlish, not merely in appearance, but in many of her ways, and when I first set eyes on her in her widow's weeds, it caused me the oddest sensation imaginable; indeed, I would not like to assert that a moisture, rare with me, did not dim my eyes as her tiny hand lingered for a moment or two in mine. "To connect, even in thought, those guileless blue eyes, that milk-white brow, and that expression at once so candid and innocent, with crime of any kind, much more with a crime so mysterious and terrible as the murder of Mr. Melray, seems to me as if one were to draw up an indictment in opposition to Nature's own instincts. And yet there have been occasions when, taking her unawares, I have caught her scrutinising me with a certain indescribable something in her gaze which has not merely puzzled me, but rendered me vaguely uneasy. At such times it has seemed to me that, instead of its being I who was studying and trying to read her, it was she who was submitting me to a like process. "I remember your giving it as your opinion that Mr. Robert Melray entertained no very friendly feeling towards his brother's widow, and the longer I stay here the more inclined I am to think you were right. But then, Mr. Melray is one of those dry, reserved, undemonstrative men, as to whose likes or dislikes it is somewhat rash to formulate too positive an opinion. Being the gentleman he is, it goes without saying that he treats her with uniform courtesy and consideration; but underlying it all there is a certain hardness and frigidity which, no doubt, are partly natural to him, but in part only as it seems to me.