fearful thing, even to the hardiest nerves, to find ourselves
suddenly alone with the dead. How much more so, if we have, but a
breathing interval before, moved and conversed with the warm and living
likeness of the motionless clay before us!

And this was the man from whom I had parted in coldness--almost in
anger--at a word--a breath! I took up the heavy hand--it fell from
my grasp, and as it did so, I thought a change passed over the livid
countenance. I was deceived; it was but a light cloud flitting over the
moon;--it rolled away, and the placid and guiltless light shone over
that scene of dread and blood, making more wild and chilling the
eternal contrast of earth and heaven--man and his Maker--passion and
immutability--dust and immortality.

But that was not a moment for reflection--a thousand thoughts hurried
upon me, and departed as swift and confusedly as they came. My mind
seemed a jarring and benighted chaos of the faculties which were its
elements; and I had stood several minutes over the corpse before, by a
vigorous effort, I shook off the stupor that possessed me, and began to
think of the course that it now behoved me to pursue.

The house I had noted in the morning was, I knew, within a few minutes'
walk of the spot; but it belonged to Dawson, upon whom the first weight
of my suspicions rested. I called to mind the disreputable character of
that man, and the still more daring and hardened one of his companion
Thornton. I remembered the reluctance of the deceased to accompany them,
and the well-grounded reason he assigned; and my suspicions amounting to
certainty, I resolved rather to proceed to Chester Park, and there
give the alarm, than to run the unnecessary risk of interrupting the
murderers in the very lair of their retreat. And yet, thought I, as I
turned slowly away, how, if they were the villains, is the appearance
and flight of the disguised horseman to be accounted for?

Then flashed upon my recollection all that Tyrrell had said of the
dogged pursuit of that mysterious person, and the circumstance of his
having passed me upon the road so immediately after Tyrrell had quitted
me. These reflections (associated with a name I did not dare breathe
even to myself, although I could not suppress a suspicion which
accounted at once for the pursuit, and even for the deed,) made me
waver in, and almost renounce my former condemnation of Thornton and
his friend: and by the time I reached the white ga