held two men, in no friendly embrace, staggering on the very verge of
the pool. Before she could look again the one had fallen on the earth;
and the other, with a desperate blow of his stick on the head of the
prostrate man, uttered an oath in a voice whose peculiar tones were
well-known to Barbara, and in the twinkling of an eye shoved the wounded
man over the bank into the Nut-tree hole!

Her blood curdling with horror, Barbara found no voice, no strength, to
speak or stir; but she became, so to speak, all eye; and as the
murderer, swiftly cramming into his hat and pockets something which she
could not define, rose up, and forgetful of the cudgel, which lay
blood-dabbled on the grass, rushed from the place where he had taken the
burden of a deadly sin upon his soul, she saw his face, and recognized
her father's sexton--David Bain.

In terror, that found no tongue, she reached her lover, and became
insensible; nor was it till her recovery, when she found herself alone
with her aunt, that she felt how important to her future life might be
the events of that night. She resolved, ere yet she spoke one word in
reply to the questions of her aunt, to ascribe her swoon to anything but
the real cause; and it was, perhaps, well she so determined, for she
remembered that, in her flight from the fatal spot where she had
witnessed the perpetration of so foul a deed, she had picked up a
letter, which she had hid in her bosom, scarcely conscious of what she
did, yet, perhaps, imperceptibly aware--with the foresight of
inexplicable convictions--that it might yet prove of essential service.
When she retired to her chamber, and had got rid of Aunt Henny, she took
the paper from its concealment, and saw that it was the empty cover of a
letter addressed to "Mr. Bruce, at the house of David Bain, Sexton;" and
then the certainty struck her of the murdered man being her affianced
husband.

The character of David Bain was marked by extreme avarice, and Barbara's
conclusions as to the instigating cause of the crime he had committed
were easily formed. But what means could she pursue in order to convict
guilt, without at the same time rendering her own appearance before a
public court of justice necessary? from which she shrank nervously,
since the cause of her presence in such a spot, and at such an hour,
must of course be revealed. A sudden thought struck her--and, wild as it
was, she put it into instant execution. She knew her father's be