ith a vividness so
terrible that it seemed he could never sleep again. His thoughts ran
round and round like a mill-wheel, without advancing a step towards a
solution of the mystery of her death.

He summoned up his recollections of every man and woman he knew in the
Colony, and asked himself regarding each one, the question, "Is it he
who has done this? Is it she who has prompted it? And who could have had
a motive, and who not, to perpetrate such a bloody deed?"

One image came again and again before his mind's eye as he reviewed the
list of his friends and enemies. The figure of Angelique appeared and
reappeared, intruding itself between every third or fourth personage
which his memory called up, until his thoughts fixed upon her with the
maddening inquiry, "Could Angelique des Meloises have been guilty of
this terrible deed?"

He remembered her passionate denunciation of the lady of Beaumanoir,
her fierce demand for her banishment by a lettre de cachet. He knew her
ambition and recklessness, but still, versed as he was in all the ways
of wickedness, and knowing the inexorable bitterness of envy, and the
cruelty of jealousy in the female breast,--at least in such women as he
had for the most part had experience of,--Bigot could hardly admit the
thought that one so fair as Angelique, one who held him in a golden net
of fascination, and to whom he had been more than once on the point of
yielding, could have committed so great a crime.

He struggled with his thoughts like a man amid tossing waves, groping
about in the dark for a plank to float upon, but could find none. Still,
in spite of himself, in spite of his violent asseverations that "it was
IMPOSSIBLE;" in spite of Cadet's plausible theory of robbers,--which
Bigot at first seized upon as the likeliest explanation of the
mystery,--the thought of Angelique ever returned back upon him like a
fresh accusation.

He could not accuse her yet, though something told him he might have to
do so at last. He grew angry at the ever-recurring thought of her, and
turning his face to the wall, like a man trying to shut out the light,
resolved to force disbelief in her guilt until clearer testimony than
his own suspicions should convict her of the death of Caroline. And
yet in his secret soul he dreaded a discovery that might turn out as he
feared. But he pushed the black thoughts aside; he would wait and watch
for what he feared to find.

The fact of Caroline's concealment