She knew who was, for the wild white face was indelibly printed on her memory, and often, when she had seen it--proud, gay, smiling--she had wondered how Mrs. Dunn could smile with that terrible deed upon her soul. And yet she did not wish to betray the guilty woman, for, no matter how she had come to be peeping in through the window, Italy believed that the fatal shot had been fired to protect herself from a villain’s power, and she had kept silent from blended feelings of gratitude and honor. Yet she had often wondered at the apparent unconsciousness of Mrs. Dunn upon the subject, wondered the more because she knew herself to be an object of dislike to her, and therefore thought it strange that she had cared enough to protect her from the stranger’s insults by the perpetration of a crime. But the real facts were quite different from what Italy imagined, and Mrs. Dunn was ignorant both of the name of the man she had slain and of the girl whose honor she had defended. She was a woman of strong passions and the fiercest jealousy, and while vainly awaiting the coming of her laggard lover at Winthrop, had conceived the idea that he was entertaining guests at his suburban home a few miles from Boston. Curiosity and resentment had led her upon a secret mission of discovery to the house, and at the moment when Craig Severn had stooped to embrace the struggling Italy, Mrs. Dunn had just arrived and become a witness of the scene. Severn’s back was toward her, and in the dim light he looked so exactly like Percy Seabright, that she had no doubt of his identity with her lover. The girl she did not recognize; but, believing that she must be both young and beautiful, she was seized with an impulse of such murderous hate, that, pressing her pistol against the window-pane, she fired pointblank at her rival. What was her horror when she saw the man fall dead in a pool of his spouting life-blood, and the girl she hated with such murderous fury standing erect, terrified, but entirely unharmed? With a wild cry of horror and despair, she threw up her white hands, from which the instrument of death had fallen unheeded, and a minute later fled from the scene as though pursued by avenging furies, believing that she had slain her lover. Accordingly, when Percy Seabright came to Winthrop the next day, she fell fainting at his feet, believing for an instant that his wraith had appeared to haunt her for her sin. But later on the truth came home to her. She had made a mistake. It was not her lover she had killed, but another man, an entire stranger. She wondered whom it could be; but she kept her own counsel, and though she read in the papers of the finding of Craig Severn’s murdered body in the river, she did not by any means associate the fact with her own sin.