and certain.
Are you accustomed to Mr. Hasbrouck's house, that you found your way
with so little difficulty to his bedroom?"

"I am accustomed--" he began.

But here his wife broke in with irrepressible passion:

"He is not accustomed to that house. He has never been beyond the first
floor. Why, why do you question him? Do you not see--"

His hand was on her lips.

"Hush!" he commanded. "You know my skill in moving about a house; how
I sometimes deceive those who do not know me into believing that I can
see, by the readiness with which I avoid obstacles and find my way even
in strange and untried scenes. Do not try to make them think I am not
in my right mind, or you will drive me into the very condition you
attribute to me."

His face, rigid, cold, and set, looked like that of a mask. Hers, drawn
with horror and filled with question that was fast taking the form of
doubt, bespoke an awful tragedy from which more than one of us recoiled.

"Can you shoot a man dead without seeing him?" asked the Superintendent,
with painful effort.

"Give me a pistol and I will show you," was the quick reply.

A low cry came from the wife. In a drawer near to every one of us there
lay a pistol, but no one moved to take it out. There was a look in the
doctor's eye which made us fear to trust him with a pistol just then.

"We will accept your assurance that you possess a skill beyond that of
most men," returned the Superintendent. And beckoning me forward, he
whispered: "This is a case for the doctors and not for the police.
Remove him quietly, and notify Dr. Southyard of what I say."

But Dr. Zabriskie, who seemed to have an almost supernatural acuteness
of hearing, gave a violent start at this, and spoke up for the first
time with real passion in his voice:

"No, no, I pray you. I can bear anything but that. Remember, gentlemen,
that I am blind; that I cannot see who is about me; that my life would
be a torture if I felt myself surrounded by spies watching to catch some
evidence of madness in me. Rather conviction at once, death, dishonour,
and obloquy. These I have incurred. These I have brought upon myself by
crime, but not this worse fate--oh! not this worse fate."

His passion was so intense and yet so confined within the bounds of
decorum, that we felt strangely impressed by it. Only the wife stood
transfixed, with the dread growing in her heart, till her white,
waxen visage seemed even more terrible to contemplate t