e her. Thanking me, she quietly followed me
up-stairs. I put her into the room in which you found her, because it
was the most secret one in the house; and there she has remained ever
since, satisfied and contented, as far as I could see, till this very
same horrible day."

"And is that all?" I asked. "Did you have no explanation with her
afterwards? Did she never give you any information in regard to the
transactions which led to her flight?"

"No, sir. She kept a most persistent silence. Neither then nor when,
upon the next day, I confronted her with the papers in my hand, and the
awful question upon my lips as to whether her flight had been occasioned
by the murder which had taken place in Mr. Leavenworth's household, did
she do more than acknowledge she had run away on this account. Some one
or something had sealed her lips, and, as she said, 'Fire and torture
should never make her speak.'"

Another short pause followed this; then, with my mind still hovering
about the one point of intensest interest to me, I said:

"This story, then, this account which you have just given me of Mary
Leavenworth's secret marriage and the great strait it put her
into--a strait from which nothing but her uncle's death could relieve
her--together with this acknowledgment of Hannah's that she had left
home and taken refuge here on the insistence of Mary Leavenworth, is the
groundwork you have for the suspicions you have mentioned?"

"Yes, sir; that and the proof of her interest in the matter which is
given by the letter I received from her yesterday, and which you say you
have now in your possession."

Oh, that letter!

"I know," Mrs. Belden went on in a broken voice, "that it is wrong, in a
serious case like this, to draw hasty conclusions; but, oh, sir, how can
I help it, knowing what I do?"

I did not answer; I was revolving in my mind the old question: was it
possible, in face of all these later developments, still to believe Mary
Leavenworth's own hand guiltless of her uncle's blood?

"It is dreadful to come to such conclusions," proceeded Mrs. Belden,
"and nothing but her own words written in her own hand would ever have
driven me to them, but----"

"Pardon me," I interrupted; "but you said in the beginning of this
interview that you did not believe Mary herself had any direct hand in
her uncle's murder. Are you ready to repeat that assertion?"

"Yes, yes, indeed. Whatever I may think of her influence in inducing
it,