ed: "But it was in
vain; quite in vain."

There were no signs of subterfuge in him now, and we all, unless I
except Durbin, began to yield him credence. Durbin never gives
credence to anybody whose name he has once heard associated with
crime.

"And this Pfeiffer was contracted to her? A man she had secretly
married while a school-girl and who at this very critical instant
had found his way to the house."

"You shall read her letter. It was meant for me, for me only--but
you shall see it. I can not talk of him or of her crime. It is
enough that I have been unable to think of anything else since first
those dreadful words fell front her lips in sleep, thirty-six hours
before she died." Then with the inconsistency of great anguish he
suddenly broke forth into the details he shrank from and cried
"She muttered, lying there, that she was no bigamist. That she had
killed one husband before she married the other. Killed him in the
old house and by the method her ancestors had taught her. And I,
risen on my elbow, listened, with the sweat oozing from my forehead,
but not believing her, oh, not believing her, any more than any one
of you would believe such words uttered in a dream by the darling of
your heart. But when, with a long-drawn sigh, she murmured,
'Murderer!' and raised her fists--tiny fists, hands which I had
kissed a thousand times--and shook them in the air, an awful terror
seized me, and I sought to grasp them and hold them down, but was
hindered by some nameless inner recoil under which I could not speak,
nor gasp, nor move. Of course, it was some dream-horror she was
laboring under, a nightmare of unimaginable acts and thoughts, but
it was one to hold me back; and when she lay quiet again and her
face resumed its old sweetness in the moonlight, I found myself
staring at her almost as if it were true--what she had said--that
word--that awful word which no woman could use with regard to
herself, even in dreams, unless--Something, an echo from the
discordant chord in our two weeks' married life, rose like the
confirmation of a doubt in my shocked and rebellious breast. From
that hour till dawn nothing in that slowly brightening room seemed
real, not her face lying buried in its youthful locks upon the
pillow, not the objects well-known and well-prized by which we were
surrounded--not myself--most of all, not myself, unless the icy
dew oozing from the roots of my lifted hair was real, unless that
s