“Robert Matheson, Med.  Dr.”

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...Such, Raymond, is the story of what I know and what I have seen.  The burden of it was too heavy for me to bear alone, and yet I could tell it to none but you.  Villiers, who was with me at the last, knows nothing of that awful secret of the wood, of how what we both saw die, lay upon the smooth, sweet turf amidst the summer flowers, half in sun and half in shadow, and holding the girl Rachel’s hand, called and summoned those companions, and shaped in solid form, upon the earth we tread upon, the horror which we can but hint at, which we can only name under a figure.  I would not tell Villiers of this, nor of that resemblance, which struck me as with a blow upon my heart, when I saw the portrait, which filled the cup of terror at the end.  What this can mean I dare not guess.  I know that what I saw perish was not Mary, and yet in the last agony Mary’s eyes looked into mine.  Whether there can be any one who can show the last link in this chain of awful mystery, I do not know, but if there be any one who can do this, you, Raymond, are the man.  And if you know the secret, it rests with you to tell it or not, as you please.

I am writing this letter to you immediately on my getting back to town.  I have been in the country for the last few days; perhaps you may be able to guess in which part.  While the horror and wonder of London was at its height—­for “Mrs. Beaumont,” as I have told you, was well known in society—­I wrote to my friend Dr. Phillips, giving some brief outline, or rather hint, of what happened, and asking him to tell me the name of the village where the events he had related to me occurred.  He gave me the name, as he said with the less hesitation, because Rachel’s father and mother were dead, and the rest of the family had gone to a relative in the State of Washington six months before.  The parents, he said, had undoubtedly died of grief and horror caused by the terrible death of their daughter, and by what had gone before that death.  On the evening of the day which I received Phillips’ letter I was at Caermaen, and standing beneath the mouldering Roman walls, white with the winters of seventeen hundred years, I looked over the meadow where once had stood the older temple of the “God of the Deeps,” and saw a house gleaming in the sunlight.  It was the house where Helen had lived.  I stayed at Caermaen for several days.  The people of the place, I found, knew little and had guessed less.  Those whom I spoke to on the matter seemed surprised that an antiquarian (as I professed myself to be) should trouble about a village tragedy, of which they gave a very commonplace version, and, as you may imagine, I told nothing of what I knew.  Most of my time was spent in the great wood that rises just above the village and climbs the hillside, and goes down to the river in the valley; such another long lovely valley, Raymond, as that on which we looked