s despised; that Mr. Chiffield took to drink tenaciously in
consequence of his misfortunes, and never saw or sought after his wife
from the day when he discovered that she was dowerless; that Mrs.
Chiffield obtained a divorce from the bonds of matrimony, but had not
married again at last accounts; and that Matthew Maltboy, Esq., on
looking over the whole episode of his acquaintance with the Whedells
thanked his stars that he had got out of their entanglements on the
reasonable terms of three hundred dollars.

BOOK ELEVENTH.

DISCOVERIES.

CHAPTER I.

THE OLD HOUSE REVISITED.

In the month that followed the acquittal of Marcus Wilkeson, three real
murders, a railway collision killing thirty persons, and a steamboat
explosion almost as tragical in its results, occurred. The Minford
affair was already getting old. Public curiosity, except in the
immediate neighborhood of the house, no longer exercised itself upon the
problem which all of Coroner Bullfast's powers of analysis had failed
to solve.

Marcus Wilkeson might have derived a selfish consolation from the fact
that other mysteries and calamities were causing his name, which last
month was on the tongue of the whole town, to be forgotten. But he had a
nobler and truer source of consolation in his dear books. In the
presence of the philosophers, and sages, and historians, and novelists,
and poets, and wits, the men of genius of the past, chroniclers of the
loss of empires, grave men who taught the vanity of life, and funny men
who taught the same lesson in a different way, Marcus felt his pack of
sorrows considerably lightening. His first, last, only disappointment in
love had subsided into a gentle and not disagreeable melancholy. His
trial, and the dreadful notoriety which his name had acquired, had
imparted to his mild nature a gentle tinge of cynicism, which
improved him.

Marcus was sitting, one morning, in the little back parlor, idly
turning over the leaves of an old folio, and looking with a half eye
through the closed window at the houses opposite, and thinking what a
deal of trouble it was possible to extract from a single block of
buildings, when a slight rap was heard at the door. Simultaneously, the
door was pushed open, and Wesley Tiffles shot in.

He had brought all his tonical properties with him. Good nature and
cheerfulness effervesced from his face. Through the trial, and since the
acquittal, Wesley Tiffles had stuck to Marcus. Twi