“She has reached the crisis.  We have no hope.”  “Singleton.”

In the hot embers, it smoked, shrivelled, disappeared; and the attorney crossed his arms over his chest to crush back the heavy sigh struggling for escape.  The long overcoat buttoned from throat to knee, enhanced his height, and upon his stern, handsome features had settled an expression of sorrowful perplexity; while his keen eyes showed the feverish restlessness that, despite his efforts, betrayed heartache.  Above the heads of the gay throng he had just left, he had seen all that evening a slender white hand beckoning to him from the bars of a dungeon; and dominating the music of the ball room, the laughter of its dancers, had risen the desperate, accusing cry: 

“You have ruined my life!”

Was it true, that his hand had dashed a foul blot of shame upon the fall pure page of a girl’s existence, and written there the fatal finis?  If she died, could he escape the moral responsibility of having been her murderer?  Amid the ebb and flow of conflicting emotions, one grim fact stared at him with sardonic significance.  If he had ruined her life, retribution promptly exacted a costly forfeit; and his happiness was destined to share her grave.

He neither analyzed nor understood the nature of the strange fascination which he had ineffectually striven to resist; and he ground his teeth, and clinched his hands with impotent rage, under the stinging and humiliating consciousness that his unfortunate victim had grappled his heart to hers, and would hold it forever in bondage.  No other woman had ever stirred the latent and unsuspected depths of his tenderness; but at the touch of her hand, the flood burst forth, sweeping aside every barrier of selfish interest, defying the ramparts of worldly pride.  Guilty or innocent, he loved her; and the wretchedness he had inflicted, was recoiling swiftly upon himself.

Unbuttoning his overcoat, he took from an inside pocket, the torn half of a large envelope, and unlocking the drawer of his desk, hunted for a similar fragment.  Spreading them out before him, he fitted the zigzag edges with great nicety, and there lay the well-known superscription:  “Last Will and Testament of Robert Luke Darrington.”  One corner of the last found bit was brown and mud-stained, but the handwriting was in perfect preservation.  As he stooped to put it all back in a secret drawer, something fell on the floor.  He picked up the dainty boutonniere of pale sweet violets, and looked at it, while a frown darkened his countenance, as though he recognized some plenipotentiary pleading for fealty to a sacred compact.

“Poor Leo! how little she suspects disloyalty.  How infinite is her trust, and what a besotted ingrate I am!”