en dialogue, challenging glances, and
suppressed passion; until, one day, he saw the woman slipping from the
house in a veil, followed her to the station, followed her in the train
to the seaside country, and out over the sandhills to the very place
where the murder was done. There she began to grope among the bents, he
watching her, flat upon his face; and presently she had something in her
hand--I cannot remember what it was, but it was deadly evidence against
the dreamer--and as she held it up to look at it, perhaps from the shock
of the discovery, her foot slipped, and she hung at some peril on the
brink of the tall sand-wreaths. He had no thought but to spring up and
rescue her; and there they stood face to face, she with that deadly
matter openly in her hand--his very presence on the spot another link of
proof. It was plain she was about to speak, but this was more than he
could bear--he could bear to be lost, but not to talk of it with his
destroyer; and he cut her short with trivial conversation. Arm in arm,
they returned together to the train, talking he knew not what, made the
journey back in the same carriage, sat down to dinner, and passed the
evening in the drawing-room as in the past. But suspense and fear
drummed in the dreamer's bosom. "She has not denounced me yet"--so his
thoughts ran: "when will she denounce me? Will it be to-morrow?" And it
was not to-morrow, nor the next day, nor the next; and their life
settled back on the old terms, only that she seemed kinder than before,
and that, as for him, the burthen of his suspense and wonder grew daily
more unbearable, so that he wasted away like a man with a disease. Once,
indeed, he broke all bounds of decency, seized an occasion when she was
abroad, ransacked her room, and at last, hidden away among her jewels,
found the damning evidence. There he stood, holding this thing, which
was his life, in the hollow of his hand, and marvelling at her
inconsequent behaviour, that she should seek, and keep, and yet not use
it; and then the door opened, and behold herself. So, once more, they
stood, eye to eye, with the evidence between them; and once more she
raised to him a face brimming with some communication; and once more he
shied away from speech and cut her off. But before he left the room,
which he had turned upside down, he laid back his death-warrant where he
had found it; and at that, her face lighted up. The next thing he heard,
she was explaining to her