n:

"My hand trembled and the bullet penetrated an inch too high."

Then he relapsed again into silence.

Mrs. Packard shuddered and went on:

"It may seem incredible to you, it seems incredible now to myself, but
I completed my journey, entered my uncle's house, was made welcome
there and started upon my new life without letting my eyes fall for one
instant on the columns of a newspaper. I did not dare to see what they
contained. That short but bitter episode of my sixteenth year was a
nightmare of horror, to be buried with my old name and all that could
interfere with the delights of the cultured existence which my uncle's
means and affection opened before me. Two years and I hardly remembered;
three years and it came to me only in dreams; four and even dreams
failed to suggest it; the present, the glorious present was all. I had
met you, Henry, and we had loved and married.

"Did any doubts come to disturb my joy? Very few. I had never received
a word from Minnesota. I was as dead to every one there as they all were
to me. I believed myself free and that the only wrong I did was in not
taking you into my confidence. But this, the very nature of my secret
forbade. How could I tell you what would inevitably alienate your
affections? That act of my early girlhood by which I had gained an
undeserved freedom had been too base; sooner than let you know this blot
on my life, I was content to risk the possibility--the inconceivable
possibility--of Mr. Brainard's having survived the attack he had made
upon his own life. Can you understand such temerity? I can not, now that
I see its results before me.

"So the die was cast and I became a wife instead of the mere shadow of
one. You were prosperous, and not a sorrow came to disturb my sense of
complete security till that day two weeks ago, when, looking up in my
own library, I saw, gleaming between me and the evening lamp, a face,
which, different as it was in many respects, tore my dead past out of
the grave and sent my thoughts reeling back to a lonely road on a black
hillside with a lighted window in view, and behind that window the
outstretched form of a man with his head among leaves not redder than
his blood.

"I have said to you, I have said to others, that a specter rose upon me
that day in the library. It was such to me,--an apparition and nothing
else. Perhaps he meant to impress himself as such, for I had heard no
footfall and only looked up because of the co