“What is that?”

“Promise me to do nothing with those letters until you have further evidence.”

“I promise you that.”

Then Paul took up a candle and left the room, as if to go to his sleeping apartment; but on reaching the hall, he threw down and extinguished the light and rushed as if for breath out into the open air.

The night was keen and frosty, the cold, slaty sky was thickly studded with sparkling stars, the snow was crusted over—­it was a fine, fresh, clear, wintry night; at another time it would have invigorated and inspired him; now the air seemed stifling, the scene hateful.

The horrible suspicion of his brother’s criminality had entered his heart for the first time, and it had come with the shock of certainty.  The sudden recognition of the handwriting, the strange revelations of the foreign letters, had not only in themselves been a terrible disclosure, but had struck the whole “electric chain” of memory and association, and called up in living force many an incident and circumstance heretofore strange and incomprehensible; but now only too plain and indicative.  The whole of Thurston’s manner the fatal day of the assassination—­his abstraction, his anxious haste to get away on the plea of most urgent business in Baltimore—­business that never was afterward heard of; his mysterious absence of the whole night from his grandfather’s deathbed—­provoking conjecture at the time, and unaccounted for to this day; his haggard and distracted looks upon returning late the next morning; his incurable sorrow; his habit of secluding himself upon the anniversary of that crime—­and now the damning evidence in these letters!  Among them, and the first he looked at, was the letter Thurston had written Marian to persuade her to accompany him to France, in the course of which his marriage with her was repeatedly acknowledged, being incidentally introduced as an argument in favor of her compliance with his wishes.

Yet Paul could not believe the crime ever premeditated—­it was sudden, unintentional, consummated in a lover’s quarrel, in a fit of jealousy, rage, disappointment, madness!  Stumbling upon half the truth, he said to himself: 

“Perhaps failing to persuade her to fly with him to France, he had attempted to carry her off, and being foiled, had temporarily lost his self-control, his very sanity.  That would account for all that had seemed so strange in his conduct the day and night of the assassination and the morning after.”

There was agony—­there was madness in the pursuit of the investigation.  Oh, pitying Heaven! how thought and grief surged and seethed in aching heart and burning brain!