fling, the scene hateful.

The horrible suspicion of his brother's criminality had entered his
heart for the first time, and it had come with the shock of certainty.
The sudden recognition of the handwriting, the strange revelations of
the foreign letters, had not only in themselves been a terrible
disclosure, but had struck the whole "electric chain" of memory and
association, and called up in living force many an incident and
circumstance heretofore strange and incomprehensible; but now only too
plain and indicative. The whole of Thurston's manner the fatal day of
the assassination--his abstraction, his anxious haste to get away on the
plea of most urgent business in Baltimore--business that never was
afterward heard of; his mysterious absence of the whole night from his
grandfather's deathbed--provoking conjecture at the time, and
unaccounted for to this day; his haggard and distracted looks upon
returning late the next morning; his incurable sorrow; his habit of
secluding himself upon the anniversary of that crime--and now the
damning evidence in these letters! Among them, and the first he looked
at, was the letter Thurston had written Marian to persuade her to
accompany him to France, in the course of which his marriage with her
was repeatedly acknowledged, being incidentally introduced as an
argument in favor of her compliance with his wishes.

Yet Paul could not believe the crime ever premeditated--it was sudden,
unintentional, consummated in a lover's quarrel, in a fit of jealousy,
rage, disappointment, madness! Stumbling upon half the truth, he said to
himself:

"Perhaps failing to persuade her to fly with him to France, he had
attempted to carry her off, and being foiled, had temporarily lost his
self-control, his very sanity. That would account for all that had
seemed so strange in his conduct the day and night of the assassination
and the morning after."

There was agony--there was madness in the pursuit of the investigation.
Oh, pitying Heaven! how thought and grief surged and seethed in aching
heart and burning brain!

And Miriam's promise to her dying mother--Miriam's promise to bring the
criminal to justice! Would she--could she now abide by its obligations?
Could she prosecute her benefactor, her adopted brother, for murder?
Could her hand be raised to hurl him down from his pride of place to
shame and death? No, no, no, no! the vow must be broken, must be evaded;
the right, even if it were the ri