d the door after her, leaving the key in the
lock. At the moment when the door banged to Geoffrey appeared in the
passage.

"Where's the key?" he asked. "Who's gone out?"

His brother answered the question. He looked backward and forward
suspiciously between Julius and Anne. "What does she go out for at his
time?" he said. "Has she left the house to avoid Me?"

Julius thought this the likely explanation. Geoffrey went down sulkily
to the gate to lock it, and returned to them, with the key in his
pocket.

"I'm obliged to be careful of the gate," he said. "The neighborhood
swarms with beggars and tramps. If you want to go out," he added,
turning pointedly to Anne, "I'm at your service, as a good husband ought
to be."

After a hurried breakfast Julius took his departure. "I don't accept
your refusal," he said to his brother, before Anne. "You will see me
here again." Geoffrey obstinately repeated the refusal. "If you come
here every day of your life," he said, "it will be just the same."

The gate closed on Julius. Anne returned again to the solitude of her
own chamber. Geoffrey entered the drawing-room, placed the volumes of
the Newgate Calendar on the table before him, and resumed the reading
which he had been unable to continue on the evening before.

Hour after hour he doggedly plodded through one case of murder after
another. He had read one good half of the horrid chronicle of crime
before his power of fixing his attention began to fail him. Then he
lit his pipe, and went out to think over it in the garden. However the
atrocities of which he had been reading might differ in other
respects, there was one terrible point of resemblance, which he had
not anticipated, and in which every one of the cases agreed. Sooner
or later, there was the dead body always certain to be found; always
bearing its dumb witness, in the traces of poison or in the marks of
violence, to the crime committed on it.

He walked to and fro slowly, still pondering over the problem which
had first found its way into his mind when he had stopped in the front
garden and had looked up at Anne's window in the dark. "How?" That had
been the one question before him, from the time when the lawyer had
annihilated his hopes of a divorce. It remained the one question still.
There was no answer to it in his own brain; there was no answer to it in
the book which he had been consulting. Every thing was in his favor if
he could only find out "how." He h