Honora. She who
rightfully bore this name was dead and hidden away. It is of crime that
I am speaking. Edwin Urquhart is a murderer, and his victim was--"

It was not necessary to say more. In the suddenly outstretched hand,
with its open palm; in the white face so drawn that his mother would not
have known it; in the gradual sinking and collapsing of the whole body,
I saw that I had driven the truth home at last, and that silence now was
the only mercy left to show him.

I was silent, therefore, and waited as we wait beside a death bed for
the final sigh of a departing spirit. But life, and not death, was in
the soul of this man before me. Ere long he faintly stirred, then a
smothered moan left his lips, followed by one word, and that word was
the echo of my own:

"Murder."

The sound it made seemed to awake whatever energy of horror lay dormant
within him. Bestirring himself, he lifted his head and repeated again
that fearsome word:

"Murder!"

Then he leaped to his feet, and his aspect grew terrible as he looked up
and shouted, as it were, into the heavens that same dread word:

"Murder!"

Filled with horror, I endeavored to take him by the arm, but he shook me
off, and cried in a terrible voice:

"A fiend, a demon, a creature of the darkest hell! I have worshiped her,
pardoned her, dreamed of her for fifteen years in solitudes dedicated to
God! O Creator of all good! What sacrilege I have committed! How shall I
ever atone for a manhood wasted on a dream, and for thoughts that must
have made the angels of Heaven veil their faces in wonder and pity.

"You must have a story to tell," he now said, turning toward me, with
the first look of natural human curiosity which I had seen in his face
since I came.

"Yes," said I, "I have; but it will not serve to lessen your horror; it
will only add to it."

"Nothing can add to it," was his low reply. "And yet I thank you for the
warning."

Encouraged by his manner, which had become strangely self-possessed, I
immediately began, and told him of the visit of this bridal party at
your inn; then as I saw that he had judged himself correctly, and that
he was duly prepared for all I could reveal, I added first your
suspicions, and then a full account of our fatal discovery in the secret
chamber.

He bore it like a man upon whom emotion has spent all its force; only,
when I had finished, he gave one groan, and then, as if he feared I
would mistake the meaning of thi