“But before I could lay my hand upon it she called for Batsy.  ’I want her to hear me declare before I go,’ said she, ’that this stroke was delivered by myself upon myself.’  But when I rose to look for Batsy I found that the shock of her mistress’s fatal act had killed her and that only her dead body was lying across the window-sill of the adjoining room.  It was a chance that robbed me of the only witness who could testify to my innocence, in case my presence in this house of death should become known, and realising all the danger in which it threw me, I did not dare to tell my mother, for fear it would make her last moments miserable.  So I told her that the poor woman had understood what she wished, but was too terrified to move or speak; and this satisfied my mother and made her last breath one of trust and contented love.  She died as I drew the dagger from her breast, and seeing this, I was seized with horror of the instrument which had cost me such a dear and valuable life and flung it wildly from the window.  Then I lifted her and laid her where you found her, on the sofa.  I did not know that the dagger was an old-time gift of her former lover, James Zabel, much less that it bore his initials on the handle.”

He paused, and the awe occasioned by the scene he had described was so deep and the silence so prolonged that a shudder passed over the whole assemblage when from some unknown quarter a single cutting voice arose in this one short, mocking comment: 

“Oh, the fairy tale!”

Was it Amabel who spoke?  Some thought so and looked her way, but they only beheld a sweet, tear-stained face turned with an air of moving appeal upon Frederick as if begging pardon for the wicked doubts which had driven him to this defence.

Frederick met that look with one so severe it partook of harshness; then, resuming his testimony, he said: 

“It is of the Zabel brothers I must now speak, and of how one of them, James by name, came to be involved in this affair.

“When I left my dead mother’s side I was in such a state of mind that I passed with scarcely so much as a glance the room where my new-found father sat sleeping.  But as I hastened on toward the quarter where the Zabels lived, I was seized by such compunction for his desolate state that I faltered in my rapid flight and did not arrive at the place of my destination as quickly as I intended.  When I did I found the house dark and the silence sepulchral.  But I did not turn away.  Remembering my mother’s anxiety, an anxiety so extreme it disturbed her final moments, I approached the front door and was about to knock when I found it open.  Greatly astonished, I at once passed in, and, seeing my way perfectly in the moonlight, entered the room on the left, the door of which also stood open.  It was the second house I had entered unannounced that night, and in this as in the other I encountered a man sitting asleep by the table.