Then he shuddered and drew back. A third and final change came with the touch of that dead woman's hand. All illusion left him, and, covering the face of the dead, he crawled out of the tank--the murderer of his wife. Still overhead hung the black sky, still abroad brooded the unbroken stillness. He looked deliberately around him. What had been done could not be undone, and he had now only to make the best of the situation. Already he felt one good result from his greater crime; it had dwarfed the other to insignificant proportions. The theft now seemed a trifle. But what had happened to Daneford and the country round, and the grounds about his house, and the tower upon which he stood? Some strange change had come over the relations between him and them. What was it? Daneford, and the country round, and the ground at his feet had receded, gone back from him. He was farther from them than he had been that day. What a strange sensation! The sensation was very peculiar. He had never felt anything like it before. What had that morning seemed most important to him had now sunk into insignificance. Nothing was of consequence--save One; namely, the chance of a stranger coming to the top of that tower while It remained there. The feeling was new to Grey, for he was new to the situation he had that night created. The solitude of a vast desert of sand under the pale stars, the solitude of the topmost frozen peaks of the Himalaya, the solitude of an ice-locked Arctic sea, the solitude for a hunted man of an unknown city, is profound and awful; but all combined and intensified a hundred-fold are nothing compared with the appalling solitude upon which man enters when over one shoulder, he knows not which, peers for ever the face of a murdered victim. That face had not yet come to Grey, but as he descended the muffled stairs of the Tower of Silence he felt her cold lips touch his forehead once again; and once again he plunged forward on his way, caring little for life. PART II. THE TOWERS OF SILENCE. CHAPTER I. A STRANGER AT THE CASTLE. "Maud, darling," said Mrs. Grant, "a gentleman dressed in black, who will not give his name, and says he wants to see you most particularly, has arrived. What message do you wish to send him? Will you see him?" "Oh, Mrs. Grant, I can't see any one. How can any one be so unreasonable as to think I can see him to-day! Such a day for a stranger to call!" Both ladies were in the deepest new mourning. "Mr. Grey has also come. He sends word that he could not think of intruding upon you, but that if you wish to see him he is at your service." "Oh, no, Mrs. Grant! Dear Mrs. Grant, do save me! Tell them all that I am too wretched to see any one. Thank them all for me, dear Mrs. Grant, and save me from them. Pray, save me from them!" The girl threw her arm round the widow and sobbed helplessly.