her as it does a tropical
flower," said Thurston, desisting from his efforts after he had tucked a
woolen shawl around her feet.

"It is really very unseasonable weather--there is snow in the
atmosphere. I don't wonder it pinches Miriam," said Paul Douglass.

Ah! they did not either of them know that it was a spiritual fever and
ague alternately burning and freezing her very heart's blood--hope and
fear, love and loathing, pity and horror, that striving together made a
pandemonium of her young bosom. Like a flight of fiery arrows came the
coincidences of the tale she had heard, and the facts she knew. That
spring, eight years before, Mr. Murray said he had, unseen, witnessed
the marriage of Thurston Willcoxen and Marian. That spring, eight years
before, she knew Mr. Willcoxen and Miss Mayfield had been together on a
visit to the capital. Thurston had gone to Europe, Marian had returned
home, but had never seemed the same since her visit to the city. The
very evening of the house-warming at Luckenough, where Marian had
betrayed so much emotion, Thurston had suddenly returned, and presented
himself at that mansion. Yet in all the months that followed she had
never seen Thurston and Marian together, Thurston was paying marked and
constant attention to Miss Le Roy, while Marian's heart was consuming
with a secret sorrow and anxiety that she refused to communicate even to
Edith. How distinctly came back to her mind those nights when, lying by
Marian's side, she had put her hand over upon her face and felt the
tears on her cheeks. Those tears! The recollection of them now, and in
this connection, filled her heart with indescribable emotion. Her
mother, too, had died in the belief that Marian had fallen by the hands
of her lover or her husband. Lastly, upon the same night of Marian's
murder, Thurston Willcoxen had been unaccountably absent, during the
whole night, from the deathbed of his grandfather. And then his
incurable melancholy from that day to this--his melancholy augmented to
anguish at the annual return of this season.

And then rising, in refutation of all this evidence, was his own
irreproachable life and elevated character.

Ah! but she had, young, as she was, heard of such cases before--how in
some insanity of selfishness or frenzy of passion, a crime had been
perpetrated by one previously and afterward irreproachable in conduct.
Piercing wound after wound smote these thoughts like swift coming
arrows.

A