How sweet she had been! how grateful, bonnie little Floy! He remembered, as if it were last night, their ride home, and how they had parted at the door betrothed lovers! He could still feel that sweet, dewy kiss on his lips in all its divine bliss, and he stifled a bitter groan as he remembered all that had come and gone since then, parting them so cruelly from each other. He felt Alva shudder as she clung to his arm, and looking down at her face, saw that it was pale and grave, with somber eyes. “Alva, you are ill, or frightened!” he cried, anxiously. “No, no; go on!” she answered, urging him on, and trying to shake off her strange depression. The spell fell over St. George, too, and icy fingers seemed to clutch at his heart. He muttered, in a strange voice: “I--I am not a coward, Alva; I do not wish to turn back; but I have a feeling that we are going to confront--something terrible.” “Yes, yes; but--go on!” she whispered back, with white lips. They moved slowly, arm in arm, around the winding walk toward the side of the house, as St. George had gone that first night, toward the side door. Everything was so still they could hear the beating of their own hearts. “The door stands ajar. Perhaps I had better go in alone. You are nervous, Alva,” he whispered. “Not at all; but the place has a depressing influence--doubtless from the stories told of it,” she murmured, clinging to him, and, indeed, putting her foot first upon the threshold. They went mutely along the gloomy hall, expecting to hear the silence broken by those awful demoniac shrieks of which Landon had told. But all was still--awfully still. Close to them a door swung wide open. They stopped, and looked with curious eyes at _what_ lay beyond the threshold--two bodies, white and cold in death, lying side by side in a pool of clotted blood that showed dark in the sunset light streaming through the open window. CHAPTER L. THE LAST VICTIM. It was no wonder that the fiends’ laugh echoed no longer through the dark, grim halls of Suicide Place, since its awful Moloch had claimed the sacrifice of the sixth decade. Beresford and his sister stood as if turned to stone upon the threshold, gazing in upon that awful sight, on which the sun’s last rays flickered dismally, as if in pity. No wonder Otho and Maybelle had not returned last night! No wonder their disappearance remained so deep a mystery! They lay here dead in that awful house where scarcely a human foot dared penetrate. Otho’s stiffened hand lay along the carpet, still grasping the weapon with which he had sent a bullet through his heart. His handsome features, white as marble by contrast with his jetty hair and mustache, showed ghastly now, with the fallen lower jaw and the half-open dark eyes, that held frozen in their unseeing upward gaze an expression of hate, as if they had looked last on some abhorred sight.