The house, including the stage, was totally dark. A weird, ghastly beam of light thrown from the wings fell fitfully upon the face of Sir Henry,--no, of Matthias himself. The great actor's identity was lost, merged, forgotten in the character he portrayed. Not another thing could be perceived in the theatre. The gaze of every man and woman and child in that vast assemblage was concentrated upon that beautiful, mobile, terrible face. The silence with which the audience listened to that piercing, shuddering voice out of the darkness was oppressive. Could one's attention have been distracted from that stage he might have caught the quickening intake of deep breaths, or here and there marked the low, quivering sighs with which nervous people, under the influence of that terrible portrayal of the agony of remorse and apprehension at detected murder, trembled, watched, and waited. Yet there was nothing actually to be seen in the opera-house but the face of the actor, or sometimes a white, ghastly hand and a dim, dark suggestion of a body writhing in mortal torture, so keen as almost to pass belief, in a _tour de force_ of unwilling confession. The detachment was perfect, the illusion was complete; there before them was a soul in judgment. As the man was forced, under the influence of a higher power than his own, to describe the murder, the base violation of hospitality, the blow of the axe that killed a guest, by which fifteen years before he had laid the foundation of his fortune; as he was constrained to act again before his judges in hypnotic trance the awful happenings of the tragedy of that Christmas Eve, of which none had suspected him; and when, on being released from the spell, his confession was read to him by the court, and the realization came to him that the fabric of respectability which he had carefully created upon the shifting sand of murder had crashed into nothing,--who, that has seen it, or heard it, will ever forget the fearful anguish and despair of that wrecked soul? As Matthias fell prostrate at the feet of the judges, moaning in utter desolation and abandonment, the appalling stillness was suddenly broken, and this time the sound came not from the stage. Out of the darkness of the auditorium a thin, high voice, fraught with a note of torture more real and intense, if possible, than that which the marvellous skill of the actor had produced, was hurled into the great vault of the theatre. "No, no," it cried; "you are wrong. It was a hammer!" The surprise of the audience for the moment held them still, while the voice shrieked out in the darkness,-- "It is enough! I'll confess. Guilty, oh, my God, guilty! It was I! The murder--light, for God's sake, light!"