“It is very rusty, and very much streaked,” she said.  “I wonder what these dark streaks can be?  They run along the edge, from the extreme point of the blade, upwards toward the handle; they look to me like the stains of blood—­as if a murderer had stabbed his victim with it, and in his haste to escape had forgotten to wipe the blade, but had left the blood upon it, to curdle and corrode the steel.  See! don’t it look so to you?” she said, approaching him, and holding the weapon up to his view.

“Girl! girl! what do you mean?” he exclaimed, throwing his hand across his eyes, and hurrying across the room.

Miriam flung down the weapon with a force that made its metal ring upon the floor, and hastening after him, she stood before him; her dark eyes fixed upon his, streaming with insufferable and consuming fire, that seemed to burn through into his brain.  She said: 

“I have heard of fiends in the human shape, nay, I have heard of Satan in the guise of an angel of light!  Are you such that stand before me now?”

“Miriam, what do you mean?” he asked, in sorrowful astonishment.

“This is what I mean!  That the mystery of Marian Mayfield’s fate, the secret of your long remorse, is no longer hidden!  I charge you with the murder of Marian Mayfield!”

“Miriam, you are mad!”

“Oh! well for me, and better still for you, if I were mad!”

He was tremendously shaken, more by the vivid memories she recalled than by the astounding charge she made.

“In the name of Heaven, what leads you to imagine such impossible guilt!”

“Good knowledge of the facts—­that this month, eight years ago, in the little Methodist chapel of the navy yard, in Washington City, you made Marian Mayfield your wife—­that this night seven years since, in just such a storm as this, on the beach below Pine Bluff, you met and murdered Marian Willcoxen!  And, moreover, I as sure you, that these facts which I tell you now, to-morrow I will lay before a magistrate, together with all the corroborating proof in my possession!”

“And what proof can you have?”

“A gentleman who, unknown and unsuspected, witnessed the private ceremony between yourself and Marian; a packet of French letters, written by yourself from Glasgow, to Marian, in St. Mary’s, in the spring of 1823; a note found in the pocket of her dress, appointing the fatal meeting on the beach where she perished.  Two physicians, who can testify to your unaccountable absence from the deathbed of your parent on the night of the murder, and also to the distraction of your manner when you returned late the next morning.”

“And this,” said Thurston, gazing in mournful amazement upon her; “this is the child that I have nourished and brought up in my house!  She can believe me guilty of such atrocious crime—­she can aim at my honor and my life such a deadly blow?”

“Alas! alas! it is my duty! it is my fate!  I cannot escape it!  I have bound my soul by a fearful oath!  I cannot evade it!  I shall not survive it!  Oh, all the heaven is black with doom, and all the earth tainted with blood!” cried Miriam, wildly.