“I saw Miss Harrison.  I accosted her in the street, one day, as any common beggar would have done, telling her a pitiful story of my poverty.  She smiled on me, spoke a few words of comfort, and laid a piece of gold in my hand.  Her sweet face charmed me.  I set myself to find out if she cared for the man she was to marry.  It had all been arranged by her father, years before, I understood, and I felt that her heart was not interested.

“After learning that, nothing could have saved Paul Linmere.  His fate was decided.  Twice I waylaid him in the streets, and showed him my pale face, which was not unlike the face of the dead.  And as he believed that I was drowned, the sight of me filled him with the most abject terror.  How I enjoyed the poor wretch’s cowardly horror!

“The night that he was to be married, I lay in wait for him at the place where the brook crossed the highway.  I had learned that he was to walk up alone from the depot, to the house of his expectant bride, and there I resolved to avenge my wrongs.  I stepped before him as he came, laid my cold hand on his arm, and bade him follow me.  He obeyed, in the most abject submission.  He seemed to have no will of his own, but yielded himself entirely to me.  He shook like one with the ague, and his footsteps faltered so that at times I had to drag him along.  I took him to the lonely graveyard, where sleep the Harrison dead, and—­” She covered her face with her hands and lapsed into silence.

“Well, Arabel, and then?” asked Castrani, fearfully absorbed in the strange narrative, feeling, as he listened, that the fate of Archer Trevlyn hung on the next words the wretched woman might speak.

“I dropped the hood from my face and confronted him.  I had no pity.  My heart was like stone.  I remembered all my wrongs; I said to myself this was the man who had made my life a shipwreck, and had sent my soul to perdition.  He stood still, frozen to the spot, gazing into my face with eyes that gleamed through the gloom like lurid fire.  ’I am Arabel Vere, whom you thought you murdered!’ I hissed in his ear.  ’The river could not hold my secret!  And thus I avenge myself for all my wrongs!’

“I struck one blow; he fell to the ground with a gurgling groan.  I knew that I had killed him, and I felt no remorse at the thought.  It seemed a very pleasant thing to contemplate.  I stooped over him, to assure myself that he was dead, and touched his forehead.  It was growing cold.  It struck me through and through with a chill of unutterable horror.  I fled, like one mad, from the place.  I entered a train of cars, which were just going down to the city, and in the morning I left New York and came here.  I fell sick.  The terrible excitement had been too much for me, and for weeks I lay in a stupor which was the twin-sister of death.  But a strong constitution triumphed, and I came slowly back to health.  I had some money on my person at the time I was taken ill, and happening to fall into the hands of a kind-hearted Irish woman, at whose door I had asked for a glass of water, I was nursed with the care that saved my life.