the rocky floor.  The whole scene was mine again and as I followed the event to its despairing close, I seemed to see my own wild figure springing away from her to the grotto’s mouth and so over the rocks.  But here fancy faltered, caught by a quick recollection to which I had never given a thought till now.  As I made my way along those rocks, a sound had struck my ear from where some stunted bushes made a shadow in the moonlight.  The wind might have caused it or some small night creature hustling away at my approach; and to some such cause I must at the time have attributed it.  But now, with brain fired by suspicion, it seemed more like the quick intake of a human breath.  Some one had been lying there in wait, listening at the one loophole in the rocks where it was possible to hear what was said and done in the heart of the grotto.  But who? who? and for what purpose this listening; and to what end did it lead?

“Though I no longer loved even the memory of my wife, I felt my hair lift, as I asked myself these questions.  There seemed to be but one logical answer to the last, and it was this:  A struggle followed by death.  The shoe fallen from her foot, the clothes found folded in her room (my wife was never orderly), and the dimly blackened wrists which were snow-white when she dealt the cards—­all seemed to point to such a conclusion.  She may have died from heart-failure, but a struggle had preceded her death, during which some man’s strong fingers had been locked about her wrists.  And again the question rose, Whose?

“If any place was ever hated by mortal man that grotto was hated by me.  I loathed its walls, its floor, its every visible and invisible corner.  To linger there—­to look—­almost tore my soul from my body; yet I did linger and did look and this is what I found by way of reward.

“Behind a projecting ledge of stone from which a tattered rug still hung, I came upon two nails driven a few feet apart into a fissure of the rock.  I had driven those nails myself long before for a certain gymnastic attachment much in vogue at the time, and on looking closer, I discovered hanging from them the rope-ends by which I was wont to pull myself about.  So far there was nothing to rouse any but innocent reminiscences.  But when I heard the dog’s low moan and saw him leap at the curled-up ends, and nose them with an eager look my way, I remembered the dark marks circling the wrists about which I had so often clasped my mother’s bracelets, and the world went black before me.

“When consciousness returned—­when I could once more move and see and think, I noted another fact.  Cards were strewn about the floor, face up and in a fixed order as if laid in a mocking mood to be looked upon by reluctant eyes; and near the ominous half-circle they made, a cushion from the lounge, stained horribly with what I then thought to be blood, but which I afterwards found to be wine.  Vengeance spoke in those ropes and in the carefully