lity, she will be a useful one again, or I
do not rightly read the patient smile which makes her face so beautiful
in its sadness.

Olive Randolph has, at my request, taken up her abode in my house. The
charm which she seems to have exerted over others she has exerted over
me, and I doubt if I shall ever wish to part with her again. In return
she gives me an affection which I am now getting old enough to
appreciate. Her feeling for me and her gratitude to Miss Althorpe are
the only treasures left her out of the wreck of her life, and it shall
be my business to make them lasting ones.

The fate of Randolph Stone is too well known for me to enlarge upon it.
But before I bid farewell to his name, I must say that after that curt
confession of his, "Yes, I did it, in the way and for the motive she
alleged," I have often tried to imagine the contradictory feelings with
which he must have listened to the facts as they came out at the
inquest, and convinced, as he had every reason to be, that the victim
was his wife, heard his friend Howard not only accept her for his, but
insist that he was the man who accompanied her to that house of death.
He has never lifted the veil from those hours, and he never will, but I
would give much of the peace of mind which has lately come to me, to
know what his sensations were, not only at that time, but when, on the
evening, after the murder, he opened the papers and read that the woman
whom he had left for dead with her brain pierced by a hat-pin, had been
found on that same floor crushed under a fallen cabinet; and what
explanation he was ever able to make to himself for a fact so
inexplicable.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote D: My attention has been called to the fact that I have not
confessed whether it was owing to a mistake made by Mr. Gryce or myself,
that Franklin Van Burnam was identified as the man who had entered the
adjoining house on the night of the murder. Well, the truth is, neither
of us was to blame for that. The man I identified (it was while watching
the guests who attended Mrs. Van Burnam's funeral, you remember) was
really Mr. Stone; but owing to the fact that this latter gentleman had
lingered in the vestibule till he was joined by Franklin and that they
had finally entered together, some confusion was created in the mind of
the man on duty in the hall, so that when Mr. Gryce asked him who it was
that came in immediately after the four who arrived together, he
answered Mr. F