"Such were some of the thoughts that surged through my brain while one might have counted a dozen slowly. My mind was made up. After one last shuddering glance at my poor dear one, I put out the gas, opened the inner door without noise, satisfied myself that no one was about, sped upstairs and reached my own room unseen. A quarter of an hour later I rang the bell, to which Charlotte, the housemaid, responded. Under the pretence of being without an envelope in which to enclose a letter I had just written, I asked her to take a lighted candle, go down to Mr. Melray's office, and bring me one from there. The rest is known. "As already stated, I never saw Evan Wildash after that night, nor did the slightest tidings of him ever reach me. After having read the story 'How, and Why,' and after having heard from Miss Sudlow by what strange chance the MS., of which the first half of the story professes to be a faithful copy, came into the hands of a certain Mr. Timmins, I can only conclude that the unknown stranger who met his death in the railway accident could have been none other than Evan. As to whether his partial derangement (for that his brain was affected I cannot doubt) was temporary or permanent, and by what motive he was possessed in describing under fictitious names, but not without sundry exaggerations and erroneous deductions, some portion of that which passed between himself and me, I am no more able to divine than the veriest stranger who may read these lines. "Of the murder of my dear husband (surely such a crime cannot go for ever unpunished!) I know nothing more than is here set down. "And that I aver to be the solemn truth. "Denia Melray." CHAPTER XV. A SCRAP OF PAPER. Within twenty-four hours of the receipt by Philip Winslade of Miss Sudlow's letter enclosing the copy of Mrs. Melray's statement, he and Mr. Robert Melray were closeted together in a private room of the hotel where the latter generally stayed during his visits to town. "What a pity, what a very great pity it is that Denia was not straightforward enough to tell me all this at first," said Mr. Melray as he replaced the statement, which he had been glancing over afresh, in his pocket. "As you will readily conceive, it is an immense relief to me to find that she is in no way implicated in my poor brother's tragical fate. It would indeed have been terrible had anything tending to the contrary come to light, and I am truly thankful my mother and I have been spared any such revelation. Unfortunately we seem no nearer the elucidation of the mystery of James's death than we were before." He sighed heavily, his chin drooped forward on his breast, and he seemed lost in thought. There was a long pause. Suddenly he raised his head and, with his eyes bent searchingly on Winslade, said: "I suppose _you_ see no reason to doubt the accuracy of any of the details embodied in my sister-in-law's narrative?"