We had journeyed several miles on our return before a word was spoken by either of us.  My companion was apparently even more painfully pre-occupied than myself.  He was, however, the first to break silence.  “The emaciated corpse we have just left little resembles the gay, beautiful girl, for whose smiles you and I were once disposed to shoot each other!” The doctor’s voice trembled with emotion, and his face, I perceived, was pale as marble.

“Mary Rawdon,” I remarked, “lives again in her daughter.”

“Yes; her very image.  Do you know,” continued he, speaking with rapid energy, “I suspect Mary Rawdon—­Mrs. Armitage, I would say—­has been foully, treacherously dealt with!”

I started with amazement; and yet the announcement but embodied and gave form and color to my own ill-defined and shadowy suspicions.

“Good heavens!  How?  By whom?”

“Unless I am greatly mistaken, she has been poisoned by an adept in the use of such destructive agents.”

“Mrs. Bourdon?”

“No; by her son.  At least my suspicions point that way.  She is probably cognizant of the crime.  But in order that you should understand the grounds upon which my conjectures are principally founded, I must enter into a short explanation.  Mrs. Bourdon, a woman of Spanish extraction, and who formerly occupied a much higher position than she does now, has lived with Mrs. Armitage from the period of her husband’s death, now about sixteen years ago.  Mrs. Bourdon has a son, a tall, good-looking fellow enough, whom you may have seen.”

“He was with his mother in the library as I entered it after leaving you.”

“Ah! well, hem!  This boy, in his mother’s opinion—­but that perhaps is somewhat excusable—­exhibited early indications of having been born a “genius.”  Mrs. Armitage, who had been first struck by the beauty of the child, gradually acquired the same notion; and the result was, that he was little by little invested—­with at least her tacit approval—­with the privileges supposed to be the lawful inheritance of such gifted spirits; namely, the right to be as idle as he pleased—­geniuses, you know, can, according to the popular notion, attain any conceivable amount of knowledge per saltum at a bound—­and to exalt himself in the stilts of his own conceit above the useful and honorable pursuits suited to the station in life in which Providence had cast his lot.  The fruit of such training soon showed itself.  Young Bourdon grew up a conceited and essentially-ignorant puppy, capable of nothing but bad verses, and thoroughly impressed with but one important fact, which was, that he, Alfred Bourdon, was the most gifted and the most ill-used of all God’s creatures.  To genius, in any intelligible sense of the term, he has in truth no pretension.  He is endowed, however, with a kind of reflective talent, which is often mistaken by fools for creative power.  The morbid fancies and melancholy scorn