“I had gone to the mother.

“‘Let us have no scene now,’ I said, ’or her blood will be on your head.’

“She took no notice of what I said, but stood silently glaring, not gazing, at the pair.  I feared an outburst, and had resolved, if it came, to carry her at once from the room, which I was quite able to do then, Mr Walton, though I don’t look like it now.  But in a moment more the young man, becoming uneasy at the motionlessness of his wife, lifted up her head, and glanced in her face.  Seeing the look of terror in his, I hastened to him, and lifting her from him, laid her down—­dead.  Disease of the heart, I believe.  The mother burst into a shriek—­not of horror, or grief, or remorse, but of deadly hatred.

“‘Look at your work!’ she cried to him, as he stood gazing in stupor on the face of the girl.  ’You said she was yours, not mine; take her.  You may have her now you have killed her.’

“‘He may have killed her; but you have murdered her, madam,’ I said, as I took the man by the arm, and led him away, yielding like a child.  But the moment I got him out of the house, he gave a groan, and, breaking away from me, rushed down a road leading from the back of the house towards the home-farm.  I followed, but he had disappeared.  I went on; but before I could reach the farm, I heard the gallop of a horse, and saw him tearing away at full speed along the London road.  I never heard more of him, or of the story.  Some women can be secret enough, I assure you.”

I need not follow the rest of our conversation.  I could hardly doubt whose was the story I had heard.  It threw a light upon several things about which I had been perplexed.  What a horror of darkness seemed to hang over that family!  What deeds of wickedness!  But the reason was clear:  the horror came from within; selfishness, and fierceness of temper were its source—­no unhappy doom.  The worship of one’s own will fumes out around the being an atmosphere of evil, an altogether abnormal condition of the moral firmament, out of which will break the very flames of hell.  The consciousness of birth and of breeding, instead of stirring up to deeds of gentleness and “high emprise,” becomes then but an incentive to violence and cruelty; and things which seem as if they could not happen in a civilized country and a polished age, are proved as possible as ever where the heart is unloving, the feelings unrefined, self the centre, and God nowhere in the man or woman’s vision.  The terrible things that one reads in old histories, or in modern newspapers, were done by human beings, not by demons.

I did not let my friend know that I knew all that he concealed; but I may as well tell my reader now, what I could not have told him then.  I know all the story now, and, as no better place will come, as far as I can see, I will tell it at once, and briefly.