ave taunted him."

"'The witness has been subjected to the closest cross-questioning; it
seems impossible to confuse her, or to shake her evidence in the
slightest degree. Divest her testimony of all comment and theory, and it
still remains as nearly conclusive as any evidence, save ocular, can be.
She it is who saw the prisoner enter his wife's room by stealth shortly
before the murder; she it is who overheard the avowal of the rival, the
rage and bitter jealousy of the wife, and her declaration that if her
husband had lived she would have made known to him her discovery, and
taunted him with it.

"'He did live; the report of his death was a mistake. It is more than
probable that the wife carried out her threat.'"

Here Anne paused and laid the newspaper down; she was composed and
grave.

"I will now tell you," she said, lifting her eyes to Dexter's face,
"what really occurred and what really was said. As I stated before, upon
seeing the announcement of her husband's death, I went to Helen. I wrote
upon a slip of paper the line you have heard, and signed the name by
which she always called me. As I had hoped, she consented to see me, and
this woman, Bagshot, took me up stairs to her room. We were alone. Both
doors were closed at first, I know; we supposed that they remained
closed all the time. I knelt down by the low couch and took her in my
arms. I kissed her, and stroked her hair. I could not cry; neither could
she. I sorrowed over her in silence. For some time we did not speak. But
after a while, with a long sigh, she said, 'Anne, I deceived him about
the name in the marriage notice--Angelique; I let him think that it was
you.' I said, 'It is of no consequence,' but she went on. She said that
after that summer at Caryl's she had noticed a change in him, but that
she did not think of me; she thought only of Rachel Bannert. But when he
brought her the marriage notice, and asked if it were I, in an instant
an entirely new suspicion leaped into her heart, roused by something in
the tone of his voice: she always judged him by his voice. From that
moment, she said, she had never been free from the jealous apprehension
that he had loved me; and then, looking at me as she lay in my arms, she
asked, 'But he never did, did he?'

"If I could have evaded her then, perhaps we should both have been
spared all that followed, for we both suffered deeply. But I did not
know how; I answered: 'He had fancies, Helen; I may have b