intimate more plainly his resolve to
place barriers between Emily and myself, I fully expected, and was ready
with my replies; but when he burst forth with a torrent of ungentlemanly
abuse--when he imputed to me mean and selfish motives, which had never
occurred to my mind--I was struck dumb with surprise and anger.

"Then, in the presence of the pure-minded girl whom I worshipped, he
charged me with a horrid crime--the crime of forgery--asserting my guilt
as recently discovered, but positive and undoubted. My spirit had raged
before--now it was on fire. I lifted my hand and clenched my fist. What
I would have done I know not. Whether I should have found words to
assert my innocence, and refute a charge utterly false--or whether, my
voice failing me from passion, I should have swept Mr. Graham from my
path, perhaps felled him to the floor, while I strode away to rally my
calmness in the open air--I cannot now conjecture; for a wild shriek
from Emily recalled me to myself, and, turning, I saw her fall fainting
upon the sofa.

"Forgetting everything but the apparently dying condition into which the
horror of the scene had thrown her I sprang forward to her relief. There
was a table beside her and some bottles upon it. I hastily snatched what
I believed to be a simple restorative, and in my agitation emptied the
contents of the phial in her face. I know not what the exact character
of the mixture could have been; but its matters not--its effect was too
awfully evident. The fatal deed was done--and mine was the hand that did
it!

"Brought suddenly to consciousness by the intolerable torture that
succeeded, the poor girl sprang screaming from the sofa, flung her arms
wildly above her head, rushed in a frantic manner through the room, and
crouched in a corner. I followed in an agony scarce less than her own;
but she repelled me with her hands, uttering piercing shrieks. Mr.
Graham, who for an instant had looked like one paralysed by the scene,
now rushed forward like a madman. Instead of aiding me in my efforts to
lift poor Emily from the floor, and so far from compassionating my
situation, which was only less pitiable than hers, he, with a fierceness
redoubled at my being the sole cause of the disaster, attacked me with a
storm of cruel reproaches, declaring that I had killed his child. With
words like these, which are still ringing in my ears, he drove me from
the room and the house; a repulsion which I, overpowered by co