Cyril sat down in the familiar easy-chair, holding his face in his hands, and gazed about him blankly. Such a home-coming as this was inexpressibly terrible to him. In a few minutes more the housekeeper came back, bringing in her hand Guy's letter from Plymouth. Cyril sat for a minute and looked at the envelope in deadly silence. Then he motioned the housekeeper out of the room with one quivering hand. Before that good woman's face, he couldn't open it and read it. As soon as she was gone, he tore it apart, trembling. As he read and read the suspicion within him deepened quickly into a doubt, the doubt into a conviction, the conviction into a certainty. He clapped his hands to his head. Oh, God, what was this? Guy acknowledged his own guilt! He confessed he had done it! Cyril's last hope was gone. Guy himself admitted it! "How I came to do it," the letter said, "I've no idea myself. A sudden suggestion--a strange, unaccountable impulse--a prompting, as it were, pressed upon me from without, and almost before I knew, the crime was committed." Cyril bent his head low upon his knees with shame. He never could hold up that head henceforth. No further doubt or hesitation remained. He knew the whole truth. Guy was indeed a murderer. He steeled himself for the worst, and read the letter through with a superhuman effort. It almost choked him to read. The very consecutiveness and coherency of the sentences seemed all but incredible under such awful circumstances. A murderer, red-handed, to speak of his crime so calmly as that! And then, too, this undying anger expressed and felt, even after death, against his victim Nevitt! Cyril couldn't understand how any man--least of all his own brother--could write such words about the murdered man whose body was then lying all silent and cold, under the open sky, among the bracken at Mambury. And once more, this awful clue of the dead man's pocket-book! Those accursed notes! That hateful sum of money! How could Guy venture to speak of it all in such terms as those--the one palpable fact that indubitably linked him with that cold-blooded murder. "The three thousand sent herewith I recovered, almost by a miracle, from that false creature's grasp, under extraordinary circumstances, and I return them now, in proof of the fact, in Montague Nevitt's own pocket-book, which I'm sure you'll recognise as soon as you look at it."