ary astonishment, and then went on
with his game.

"I have been made acquainted with your sad situation, sir," said
Mr. Neal; "and I have come here to place my services at your
disposal--services which no one but myself, as your medical attendant
informs me, is in a position to render you in this strange place.
My name is Neal. I am a writer to the signet in Edinburgh; and I may
presume to say for myself that any confidence you wish to place in me
will be confidence not improperly bestowed."

The eyes of the beautiful wife were not confusing him now. He spoke
to the helpless husband quietly and seriously, without his customary
harshness, and with a grave compassion in his manner which presented him
at his best. The sight of the death-bed had steadied him.

"You wish me to write something for you?" he resumed, after waiting for
a reply, and waiting in vain.

"Yes!" said the dying man, with the all-mastering impatience which his
tongue was powerless to express, glittering angrily in his eye. "My hand
is gone, and my speech is going. Write!"

Before there was time to speak again, Mr. Neal heard the rustling of a
woman's dress, and the quick creaking of casters on the carpet behind
him. Mrs. Armadale was moving the writing-table across the room to
the foot of the bed. If he was to set up those safeguards of his own
devising that were to bear him harmless through all results to come, now
was the time, or never. He, kept his back turned on Mrs. Armadale, and
put his precautionary question at once in the plainest terms.

"May I ask, sir, before I take the pen in hand, what it is you wish me
to write?"

The angry eyes of the paralyzed man glittered brighter and brighter. His
lips opened and closed again. He made no reply.

Mr. Neal tried another precautionary question, in a new direction.

"When I have written what you wish me to write," he asked, "what is to
be done with it?"

This time the answer came:

"Seal it up in my presence, and post it to my ex--"

His laboring articulation suddenly stopped and he looked piteously in
the questioner's face for the next word.

"Do you mean your executor?"

"Yes."

"It is a letter, I suppose, that I am to post?" There was no answer.
"May I ask if it is a letter altering your will?"

"Nothing of the sort."

Mr. Neal considered a little. The mystery was thickening. The one way
out of it, so far, was the way traced faintly through that strange story
of the unfinished l