er husband, but had pointed him out to
all the world as the villainous author of that crime which for so long a
time had occupied my own and the public's attention.

Thinking that you may find the same difficulty in grasping this terrible
fact, and being anxious to save you from the suspense under which I
myself labored for so many hours, I here subjoin a written statement
made by this woman some weeks later, in which the whole mystery is
explained. It is signed Olive Randolph; the name to which she evidently
feels herself best entitled.

* * * * *

"The man known in New York City as Randolph Stone was first seen by me
in Michigan five years ago. His name then was John Randolph, and how he
has since come to add to this the further appellation of Stone, I must
leave to himself to explain.

"I was born in Michigan myself, and till my eighteenth year I lived
with my father, who was a widower without any other child, in a little
low cottage amid the sand mounds that border the eastern side of the
lake.

"I was not pretty, but every man who passed me on the beach or in the
streets of the little town where we went to market and to church,
stopped to look at me, and this I noticed, and from this perhaps my
unhappiness arose.

"For before I was old enough to know the difference between poverty and
riches, I began to lose all interest in my simple home duties, and to
cast longing looks at the great school building where girls like myself
learned to speak like ladies and play the piano. Yet these ambitious
promptings might have come to nothing if I had never met _him_. I might
have settled down in my own sphere and lived a useful if unsatisfied
life like my mother and my mother's mother before her.

"But fate had reserved me for wretchedness, and one day just as I was on
the verge of my eighteenth year, I saw John Randolph.

"I was coming out of church when our eyes first met, and I noticed after
the first shock my simple heart received from his handsome face and
elegant appearance, that he was surveying me with that strange look of
admiration I had seen before on so many faces; and the joy this gave me,
and the certainty which came with it of my seeing him again, made that
moment quite unlike any other in my whole life, and was the beginning of
that passion which has undone me, ruined him, and brought death and
sorrow to many others of more worth than either of us.

"He was not a residen