ay upon the
smooth, sweet turf amidst the summer flowers, half in sun and half in
shadow, and holding the girl Rachel's hand, called and summoned those
companions, and shaped in solid form, upon the earth we tread on, the
horror which we can but hint at, which we can only name under a figure.
I would not tell Villiers of this, nor of that resemblance, which struck
me as with a blow upon my heart, when I saw the portrait, which filled
the cup of terror at the end. What this can mean I dare not guess. I
know that what I saw perish was not Mary, and yet in the last agony
Mary's eyes looked into mine. Whether there be any one who can show the
last link in this chain of awful mystery, I do not know, but if there be
any one who can do this, you, Raymond, are the man. And if you know the
secret, it rests with you to tell it or not, as you please.

I am writing this letter to you immediately on my getting back to town.
I have been in the country for the last few days; perhaps you may be
able to guess in what part. While the horror and wonder of London was at
its height--for 'Mrs. Beaumont,' as I have told you, was well known in
society--I wrote to my friend Dr. Phillips, giving some brief outline,
or rather hint, of what had happened, and asking him to tell me the name
of the village where the events he had related to me occurred. He gave
me the name, as he said with the less hesitation, because Rachel's
father and mother were dead, and the rest of the family had gone to a
relative in the State of Washington six months before. The parents, he
said, had undoubtedly died of grief and horror caused by the terrible
death of their daughter, and by what had gone before that death. On the
evening of the day on which I received Phillips's letter I was at
Caermaen, and standing beneath the mouldering Roman walls, white with
the winters of seventeen hundred years, I looked over the meadow where
once had stood the older temple of the 'God of the Deeps,' and saw a
house gleaming in the sunlight. It was the house where Helen had lived.
I stayed at Caermaen for several days. The people of the place, I found,
knew little and had guessed less. Those whom I spoke to on the matter
seemed surprised that an antiquarian (as I professed myself to be)
should trouble about a village tragedy, of which they gave a very
commonplace version, and, as you may imagine, I told nothing of what I
knew. Most of my time was spent in the great wood that rises just