When he left Mr. Sutherland it was with feelings such as few who knew him supposed him capable of experiencing.  Unattractive as he was in every way, ungainly in figure and unprepossessing of countenance, this butt of the more favoured youth in town had a heart whose secret fires were all the warmer for being so persistently covered, and this heart was wrung with trouble and heavy with a struggle that bade fair to leave him without rest that night, if not for many nights to come.  Why?  One word will explain.  Unknown to the world at large and almost unknown to himself, his best affections were fixed upon the man whose happiness he thus unexpectedly saw himself destined to destroy.  He loved Mr. Sutherland.

The suspicion which he now found transferred in his own mind from the young girl whose blood-stained slippers he had purloined during the excitement of the first alarm, to the unprincipled but only son of his one benefactor, had not been lightly embraced or thoughtlessly expressed.  He had had time to think it out in all its bearings.  During that long walk from Portchester churchyard to Mr. Halliday’s door, he had been turning over in his mind everything that he had heard and seen in connection with this matter, till the dim vision of Frederick’s figure going on before him was not more apparent to his sight than was the guilt he so deplored to his inward understanding.

He could not help but recognise him as the active party in the crime he had hitherto charged Amabel with.  With the clew offered by Frederick’s secret anguish at the grave of Agatha, he could read the whole story of this detestable crime as plainly as if it had been written in letters of fire on the circle of the surrounding darkness.  Such anguish under such circumstances on the part of such a man could mean but one thing—­remorse; and remorse in the breast of one so proverbially careless and corrupt, over the death of a woman who was neither relative nor friend, could have but one interpretation, and that was guilt.

No other explanation was possible.  Could one be given, or if any evidence could be adduced in contradiction of this assumption, he would have dismissed his new suspicion with more heartiness even than he had embraced his former one.  He did not wish to believe Frederick guilty.  He would have purchased an inner conviction of his innocence almost at the price of his own life, not because of any latent interest in the young man himself, but because he was Charles Sutherland’s son, and the dear, if unworthy, centre of all that noble man’s hopes, aims, and happiness.  But he could come upon no fact capable of shaking his present belief.  Taking for truth Amabel’s account of what she had seen and done on that fatal night—­something which he had hesitated over the previous day, but which he now found himself forced to accept or do violence to his own secret convictions—­and adding to it such facts as had come to his own knowledge in his self-imposed role of detective, he had but to test the events of that night by his present theory of Frederick’s guilt, to find them hang together in a way too complete for mistake.