tice. Neither could I live at her
side knowing the guilty secret which parted us; or live anywhere in
the world under this same consciousness. Therefore, I meant to kill
myself before another sun rose. But she was more deeply stricken
with a sense of her own guilt than I realized. When I returned home
for the pistol which was to end our common misery I found that she
had taken her punishment into her own hands. This strangely affected
me, but when I found that, in doing this, she had remembered that I
should have to face the world after she was gone, and so left a few
lines for me to show in explanation of her act, my revolt against
her received a check which the reading of her letter only increased.
But the lines she thus wrote and left were not true lines. All her
heart was mine, and if it was a wicked heart she has atoned--"

He paused, quite overcome. Others amongst us were overcome, too,
but only for a moment. The following remark from the district
attorney soon recalled us to the practical aspects of the case.

"You have accounted for many facts not hitherto understood. But
there is still a very important one which neither yourself nor
Miss Tuttle has yet made plain. There was a candle on the scene
of crime; it was out when this officer arrived here. There was
also one found burning in the upstairs room, aside from the one you
professedly used in your tour of inspection there. Whence came
those candles? And did your wife blow out the one in the library
herself, previous to the shooting, or was it blown out afterward
and by other lips?"

"These are questions which, as I have already said, I have no means
of answering," repeated Mr. Jeffrey. "The courage which brought
her here may have led her to supply herself with light; and, hard
as it is to conceive, she may even have found nerve to blow out the
light before she lifted the pistol to her breast:"

The district attorney and the major looked unconvinced, and the
latter, turning toward Miss Tuttle, asked if she had any remark to
make on the subject.

But she could only repeat Mr. Jeffrey's statement.

"These are questions I can not answer either. I have said that I
stopped at the library door, which means that I saw nothing of what
passed within."

Here the major asked where Mrs. Jeffrey's letter was to be found.
It was Mr. Jeffrey who replied:

"Search in my room for a book with an outside cover of paper still
on it. You will probably fin