“I was never a man of much logic, and when they came to me on that morning of which I have just spoken and took me in where she lay and pointed to her beautiful cold body stretched out in seeming peace under the satin coverlet, and then to the pile of dainty clothes lying neatly folded on a chair with just one fairy slipper on top, I shuddered at her fate but asked no questions, not even when one of the women of the house mentioned the circumstance of the single slipper and said that a search should be made for its mate.  Nor was I as much impressed as one would naturally expect by the whisper dropped in my ear that something was the matter with her wrists.  It is true that I lifted the lace they had carefully spread over them and examined the discoloration which extended like a ring about each pearly arm; but having no memories of any violence offered her (I had not so much as laid hand upon her in the grotto), these marks failed to rouse my interest.  But—­and now I must leap a year in my story—­ there came a time when both of these facts recurred to my mind with startling distinctness and clamoured for explanation.

“I had risen above the shock which such a death following such events would naturally occasion even in one of my blunted sensibilities, and was striving to live a new life under the encouragement of my now fully reconciled father, when accident forced me to re-enter the grotto where I had never stepped foot since that night.  A favourite dog in chase of some innocent prey had escaped the leash and run into its dim recesses and would not come out at my call.  As I needed him immediately for the hunt, I followed him over the promontory and, swallowing my repugnance, slid into the grotto to get him.  Better a plunge to my death from the height of the rocks towering above it.  For there in a remote corner, lighted up by a reflection from the sea, I beheld my setter crouched above an object which in another moment I recognized as my dead wife’s missing slipper.  Here!  Not in the waters of the sea or in the interstices of the rocks outside, but here!  Proof that she had never walked back to the house where she was found lying quietly in her bed; proof positive; for I knew the path too well and the more than usual tenderness of her feet.

“How then, did she get there; and by whose agency?  Was she living when she went, or was she already dead?  A year had passed since that delicate shoe had borne her from the boat into these dim recesses; but it might have been only a day, so vividly did I live over in this moment of awful enlightenment all the events of the hour in which we sat there playing for the possession of our child.  Again I saw her gleaming eyes, her rosy, working mouth, her slim, white hand, loaded with diamonds, clutching the cards.  Again I heard the lap of the sea on the pebbles outside and smelt the odour of the wine she had poured out for us both.  The bottle which had held it; the glass from which she had drunk lay now in pieces on