ccents, and
stepped into _that_ room.

Then as if roused into galvanic action, I rose and followed, going up
those midnight stairs and gaining the door where he had passed as if
the impulse moving me had lent to my steps a certainty which preserved
me from slipping even upon that dank and dangerous ascent. When in
view of him again, I saw, as I had expected, that he was drawn up by
the window and was bowing and beckoning with even more grace and
suavity than he had shown below. "Will you not step out, Mistress
Juliet?" he was saying; "I have a plan which I am anxious to submit to
your judgment and which can only be decided upon from without. A high
step true, but Orrin has lifted you over worse places and--and you
will do me a great favor if only--" Here he gave a malignant shriek,
and his countenance, from the most smiling and benignant expression,
altered into that of a fiend from hell. "Ha, ha, ha!" he yelled. "She
goes, and he is so fearful for her that he leaps after. That is a
goodly stroke! Both--both--Crack! Ah, she looks at me, she looks--"

Silence and then a frozen figure crouching before my eyes, just the
silence and just the figure I remembered seeing there twenty years
before, only the face is older and the horror, if anything, greater.
What did it mean? I tried to think, then as the full import of the
scene burst upon me, and I realized that it was a murderer I was
looking upon, and that Orrin, poor Orrin, had been innocent, I sank
back and fell upon the floor, lost in the darkness of an utter
unconsciousness.

I did not come to myself for hours; when I did I found myself alone in
the old house.

* * * * *

Nothing was ever done to the Colonel, for when I came to tell my story
the doctors said that the facts I related did not prove him to have
been guilty of crime, as his condition was such that his own words
could not be relied upon in a matter on which he had brooded more or
less morbidly for years. So now when I see him pass through the
churchyard or up and down the village street and note that he is
affable as ever when he sees me, but growing more and more preoccupied
with his own thoughts I do not know whether to look upon him with
execration or profoundest pity, nor can any man guide me or satisfy my
mind as to whether I should blame his jealousy or Orrin's pride for
the pitiful tragedy which once darkened my life, and turned our
pleasant village into a desert.