“Proof?  Is not a man’s word—­”

“No man’s confession is worth much without some evidence to support it.  In your case there is none.  You cannot even produce the pistol with which you assert yourself to have committed the deed.”

“True, true.  I was frightened by what I had done, and the instinct of self-preservation led me to rid myself of the weapon in any way I could.  But someone found this pistol; someone picked it up from the sidewalk of Lafayette Place on that fatal night.  Advertise for it.  Offer a reward.  I will give you the money.”  Suddenly he appeared to realize how all this sounded.  “Alas!” cried he, “I know the story seems improbable; but it is not the probable things that happen in this life, as, you should know, who every day dig deep into the heart of human affairs.”

Were these the ravings of insanity?  I began to understand the wife’s terror.

“I bought the pistol,” he went on, “of—­alas!  I cannot tell you his name.  Everything is against me.  I cannot adduce one proof; yet even she is beginning to fear that my story is true.  I know it by her silence, a silence that yawns between us like a deep and unfathomable gulf.”

But at these words her voice rang out with passionate vehemence.

“No, no, it is false!  I will never believe that your hands have been plunged in blood.  You are my own pure-hearted Constant, cold, perhaps, and stern, but with no guilt upon your conscience save in your own wild imagination.”

“Zulma, you are no friend to me,” he declared, pushing her gently aside.  “Believe me innocent, but say nothing to lead these others to doubt my word.”

And she said no more, but her looks spoke volumes.

The result was that he was not detained, though he prayed for instant commitment.  He seemed to dread his own home, and the surveillance to which he instinctively knew he would henceforth be subjected.  To see him shrink from his wife’s hand as she strove to lead him from the room was sufficiently painful; but the feeling thus aroused was nothing to that with which we observed the keen and agonized expectancy of his look as he turned and listened for the steps of the officer who followed him.

“From this time on I shall never know whether or not I am alone,” was his final observation as he left the building.

Here is where the matter rests and here, Miss Strange, is where you come in.  The police were for sending an expert alienist into the house; but agreeing with me, and, in fact, with the doctor himself, that if he were not already out of his mind, this would certainly make them so, they, at my earnest intercession, have left the next move to me.

That move as you must by this time understand involves you.  You have advantages for making Mrs. Zabriskie’s acquaintance of which I beg you to avail yourself.  As friend or patient, you must win your way into that home?  You must sound to its depths one or both of these two wretched hearts.  Not so much now for any possible reward which may follow the elucidation of this mystery which has come so near being shelved, but for pity’s sake and the possible settlement of a question which is fast driving a lovely member of your sex distracted.