In substance, Ambrose confessed what Silas had confessed; claiming, however, to have only struck Jago under intolerable provocation, so as to reduce the nature of his offense against the law from murder to manslaughter.

Was the confession really the true statement of what had taken place?
or had the sheriff and the governor, acting in the interests of the family name, persuaded Ambrose to try this desperate means of escaping the ignominy of death on the scaffold?
The sheriff and the governor preserved impenetrable silence until the pressure put on them judicially at the trial obliged them to speak.
Who was to tell Naomi of this last and saddest of all the calamities which had fallen on her?
Knowing how I loved her in secret, I felt an invincible reluctance to be the person who revealed Ambrose Meadowcroft's degradation to his betrothed wife.

Had any other member of the family told her what had happened?
The lawyer was able to answer me; Miss Meadowcroft had told her.
I was shocked when I heard it.

Miss Meadowcroft was the last person in the house to spare the poor girl; Miss Meadowcroft would make the hard tidings doubly terrible to bear in the telling.

I tried to find Naomi, without success.