Oh, for a better record in the past!--a staff on which to lean in such an hour as this! But while nothing serious clouded my name, I had more to blush for than to pride myself upon in my career as prince of good fellows,--and these men knew it, both of them, and let it weigh in the scale already tipped far off its balance by coincidences which a better man than myself would have found it embarrassing to explain.

I recognised all this, I say, in the momentary glance I cast at their stern and unresponsive figures; but the courage which had served me in lesser extremities did not fail me now, and, kneeling down before my dead betrothed, I kissed her cold white hand with sincere compunction, before attempting the garbled and probably totally incoherent story with which I endeavoured to explain the inexplainable situation.
They listened--I will do them that much justice; but it was with such an air of incredulity that my words fell with less and less continuity and finally lost themselves in a confused stammer as I reached the point where I pulled the cushions from the couch and made my ghastly discovery.
"You see--see for yourselves--what confronted me.

My betrothed--a dainty, delicate woman--dead--alone--in this solitary, far-away spot--the victim of what?
I asked myself then--I ask myself now.

I cannot understand it--or those glasses yonder--or _those marks!"_ They were black by this time--unmistakable--not to be ignored by them or by me.
"We understand those marks, and you ought to," came from the second man, the one I did not know.
My head fell forward; my lips refused to speak the words.

I saw as in a flash, a picture of the one woman bending over the other; terror, reproach, anguish in the eyes whose fixed stare would never more leave my consciousness, an access of rage or some such sadden passion animating the other whose every curve spoke tenderness, whose every look up to this awful day had been as an angel's look to me.