e passed and memories faded I grew afraid once more. Dick
was no drinking man but everybody drank a little then, even the women.
Men joked about it and the women, poor souls, tried to. Well--just
five years almost to a day they brought him home to me--dead. He had
had a few drinks--the first since our marriage. He was driving an ugly
horse--and it happened.

"Some way Cynthia heard and she came home to comfort me. I think that
when she stood with me beside Dick's grave she was glad she had done
what she had done and felt a kind of peace. Roger was still gone but
it would not have mattered. It was then that we carried these wedding
things up here and locked them in this old square trunk with the brass
nail-heads. And we thought that life for us both was over.

"Cynthy's father was glad to have her home. He sold the hotel and
never went near it. He tried in every way to make up to Cynthy and his
wife. For Cynthy's mother grieved about it all long after Cynthy had
learned to smile again. And that nearly killed Cynthy's father. Some
folks claimed it really did worry Mrs. Churchill to death, for she died
the spring after Dick was buried.

"After that Cynthia took her father traveling, for he was very nearly
heartbroken over his wife's death. It was somewhere in England that
they met your father, John. Of course, I can understand how a man like
your father must have loved Cynthy on sight. But she never could
understand it. She thought she was all through with love. She wrote
and told me how she had explained all about Roger and how he had said
it made him love her all the more. She tried to fight him but strong
men are hard to deny. He had a hard time of it, I imagine, but he won
her at last and took her away to India. She wrote me when you were
born and for some years after, but toward the end, when she was sick so
much, I think my letters made her homesick.

"Roger came back. His stepsister got into trouble and died, leaving
little David. Roger took him and raised him in memory of the son he
knew he might have had. When he found Cynthia was married he had that
stone put in the cemetery. He explained the idea to me.

"'The girl, Cynthia, was mine and I killed her. She is dead and it is
to the memory of her sweetness that I have erected that stone. The
woman, Cynthia, is another man's wife.'

"So that, then, is the history of that trunk. The thing, John, that is
killing little Jim Tumley is t