or the perpetrator might, in his consciousness of the possibility of her having discovered him, come to the resolution to dispose forever of any chance of her being a witness against him. They were poor children, and had only money enough to go and come from May’s wood; and yet that money was found upon the girl. Consequently, she had not been at any expense in getting to Bussey’s wood by the cars. _The murderer paid their fare!_ After reaching the thick shades around the rock, and giving her time to become confident of his integrity and friendship,—so much so as to be sufficiently at ease to commence the weaving of leaf chaplets, waiting the promised interview with her mother,—he sent the boy down to the brook for water, and where he was subsequently found. Then he turned upon the girl; for if the boy had been near by, his cries could not have failed to arouse assistance, for there were men working within three hundred yards of the place where her body was discovered. He must have brought about a separation between the children, and at that spot; for he could not have murdered them together, and there, in that broad sunlight, with the swirl of the mower’s scythes down in the near meadow evident to his ear, carried the body of the boy to the brook at the foot of the hill, and thrown it among the alders. He killed the girl as soon as the boy was out of sight, and then he followed the little fellow to the place where he had sent him, and slaughtered him in the gloom of those thick bushes. Now, who was that man whom she would have exposed? With whose acts could she have by locality and association of daily life become acquainted? Was he from Lynn, or its vicinity,—where she had been living before she came to Boston? Or was the discovery, or the imagined discovery, of a crime made in Boston, and of some one living in Boston? The girl was simply murdered,—no duplex crime,—attacked while she was sitting with leaves and wreaths in her lap, and the first blows were delivered upon her back and sides, and after that in front and in great confusion. The boy was killed, not because he saw the murder done upon his sister, but because he could have told who it was that accompanied them from Boston, or joined them at May’s wood, where they were expected, or anywhere along the first part of that terrible journey. There was no other motive for his death. If the man had not been seen by the boy, and known personally to the boy, he would have been alive now. Consequently it was some one who was intimate with those children and who could not allow the boy to live any more than he could allow the girl to live. It was a double self-defence.