e divined the rest They were _hers_. The great prize, for which he
himself was ready to risk life, was now his own; and he hastened away
from the place, and turned with all speed towards Baden.

It was not yet daybreak when he got back, and, gaining his room, locked
the door. He knew not why he did so, but in the fear and turmoil of
his mind he dreaded the possibility of seeing or being seen. He feared,
besides, lest some chance word might escape him, some vague phrase might
betray him as the witness of a scene he resolved never to disclose.
Sometimes, indeed, as he sat there, he would doubt the whole incident,
and question whether it had not been the phantasm of an excited brain;
but there before him on the table lay the letters; there they were, the
terrible evidences of the late crime, and perhaps the proofs of guilt in
another too!

This latter thought nearly drove him distracted. There before him lay
what secured to him the prize he sought for, and yet what, for aught
he knew, might contain what would render that object a shame and a
disgrace. It lay with himself to know this. Once in her possession,
he, of course, could never know the contents, or if by chance discovery
came, it might come too late. He reasoned long and anxiously with
himself; he tried to satisfy his mind that there were cases in which
self-preservation absolved a man from what in less critical emergencies
had been ignominious to do. He asked himself, "Would not a man willingly
burn the documents whose production would bring him to disgrace and
ruin? and, by the same rule, would not one eagerly explore those which
might save him from an irreparable false step? At all events," thought
he, "Fortune has thrown the chance in my way, and so--" He read them.

CHAPTER VII. THE COTTAGE NEAR BREGENZ

There was something actually artistic in the choice old Holmes had
made for his daughter's residence near Bregenz. It was an old-fashioned
farmhouse, with a deep eave, and a massive cornice beneath it. A wooden
gallery ran the entire length, with a straggling stair to it, overgrown
with a very ancient fig-tree, whose privilege it was to interweave
through the balustrades, and even cross the steps at will the
whole nearly hidden by the fine old chestnut-trees which clothe the
Gebhardts-Berg to its very summit. It was the sort of spot a lone and
sorrowing spirit might have sought out to weep away unseen, to commune
with grief in solitude, and know nothi