’I love but thee,
  And thee will I love to eternity.’”

As the last word fell from Mr. Gryce’s lips, the District Attorney muttered a quick exclamation, and sat down heavily in his chair.

“No coincidence that,” he cried, with forced vivacity.  “The couplet is too little known.”

“Exactly,” came from Mr. Gryce in dry confirmation.  “Mrs. Taylor, as well as her friends can judge, is a woman of thirty-five or thirty-eight.  If she went to Switzerland as a girl, this would make her visit coincident, so far as we can calculate from our present knowledge, with that of Carleton Roberts.  For the surer advancement of our argument, let us say that it was.  What follows?  Let the inscription of this label speak for us.  They met; they loved—­as was natural when we remember the youth and good looks of both, and—­they parted.  This we must concede, or how could the experience have been one she could not recall without a heart-break.  They parted, and he returned home, to marry within the year, while she—­I do not think she married—­though I have no doubt she looks upon herself as a wife and forever bound to the man who deserted her.  Women of her kind think in this way of such matters, and act upon them too as is shown by the fact that, on following him here, she passed herself off as a woman separated from her husband.  Changing the Miss before her name to Mrs., she lived under this assumption for twelve years at her present hotel.  In all that time, so far as I can learn, she has never been visited by anyone of an appearance answering to that of her former lover; nor have I any reason to think she ever intruded herself on him, or made herself in any way obnoxious.  He was married and settled, and contrary to the usual course of men who step with one stride into affluence, was living a life of usefulness which was rapidly making him a marked man in public esteem.  Perhaps she had no right to meddle with what no longer concerned her.  At all events, there is no evidence of her having done so in all these fourteen years.  Even after Mrs. Roberts’ death, all went on as usual; but—­” Here Mr. Gryce became emphatic—­“when he turned his attention to a second marriage and that with a very young girl—­(I can name her to you, gentlemen, if you wish) her patient soul may have been roused; she may have troubled him with importunities; may have threatened him with a scandal which would have interfered greatly with his political hopes if it had not ended them at once.  I can conceive such an end to her long patience, can’t you, gentlemen?  And what is more, if this were so, and the gentleman found the situation intolerable, it might account for the flight of that arrow as nothing else ever will.”

Both men had started to their feet.

“How!  It was not she——­”