on with other circumstances, but
just now she was too full of her intelligence to dwell on anything else.

"A man was murdered in our barn last night. They 've found the body!"
she exclaimed.

As the meaning of her words broke on him, Joseph was filled with
that sort of mental confusion which one experiences when the scene or
circumstances of a dream recur in actual life. Was he still dreaming
that ghostly vision of suspicion and the death-trap of circumstances?
Was this a mere continuation of it? No, he was awake; his sister-in-law
standing there, with pallid face and staring eyes, was not an
apparition. The horrid, fatal reality which he had been imagining was
actually upon him.

"I did not do it!" dropped from his ashen lips.

"You do it? Are you crazy? Who said anything about your doing it?" cried
the astounded woman.

The ring of genuine amazement in her voice was scarcely needed to recall
Joseph to the practical bearing of his surroundings, and break the spell
of superstitious dread. The sound of his own words had done it. With a
powerful effort he regained something like self-control, and said, with
a forced laugh:--

"What an absurd thing for me to say! I don't know what I could have been
thinking of. Very odd, was it not? But, dear me! a man murdered in our
barn? You don't tell me! How terrible!"

His constrained, overdone manner was not calculated to abate Mrs.
Kilgore's astonishment, and she continued to stare at him with an
expression in which a vague terror began to appear. There are few
shorter transitions than that from panic to anger. Seeing that her
astonishment at his reception of the news increased rather than
diminished, he became exasperated at the intolerable position in which
he was placed. His face, before so pale, flushed with anger.

"Damnation! What are you staring at me that way for?" he cried fiercely.

Mrs. Kilgore gave a little cry, half of indignation, half of fright, and
went out of the room, shutting the door after her.

Joseph had ample opportunity to review the situation before he was again
disturbed, which, indeed, was not till some hours later, at dusk, when
Silas came home, and the tea-table was set. Silas had been promptly
summoned from his shop when the discovery of the body was made, and had
been busy all the afternoon with the police, the coroner, and the crowds
of visitors to the scene of the tragedy.

The conversation at the tea-table ran entirely upon the variou