The House of the Whispering Pines | Page 7

off before committing herself to a fate that
proclaimed me a traitor to this symbol. I should see that ring again. I
should find it in a letter filled with bitter words. I would not think of it
or of them now. I would try to learn how she had committed this act,
whether by poison or--
It must have been by poison; no other means would suggest themselves
to one of her refined sense; but if so, why those marks on her neck,
growing darker and darker as I stared at them!
My senses reeled as I scrutinised those marks. Small, delicate but
deadly, they stared upon me from either side of her white neck till
nature could endure no more and I tottered back against the further wall,
beholding no longer room, nor lounge, nor recumbent body, but a
young girl's exquisite face, set in lines which belied her seventeen years,
and made futile any attempt on my part at self-deception when my
reason inexorably demanded an explanation of this death. As suicide it
was comprehensible, as murder, not, unless--
And it had been murder!
I sank to the floor as I fully realised this.

III
"OPEN!"
PRINCE.--Bring forth the parties of suspicion.
FRIAR.--I am the greatest, as the time and place Doth make against me,
of this direful murder; And here I stand, both to impeach and purge.
Myself condemned and myself excused.
Romeo and Juliet.
I have mentioned poison as my first thought. It was a natural one, the

result undoubtedly of having noticed two small cordial glasses standing
on a little table over against the fireplace. When I was conscious again
of my own fears, I crossed to the table and peered into these glasses.
They were both empty. However, they had not been so long. In each I
found traces of anisette cordial, and though no bottle stood near I was
very confident that it could readily be found somewhere in the room.
What had preceded and followed the drinking of this cordial?
As I raised my head from bending over these glasses--not club glasses,
by the way--I caught sight of my face in the mantel mirror. It gave me
maddening thoughts. In this same mirror there had been reflected but a
little while before, two other faces, for a sight of whose expression at
that fatal moment I would gladly risk my soul.
How had she looked--how that other? Would not the story of those
awful, those irrevocable moments be plain to my eye, if the quickly
responsive glass could but retain the impressions it receives and give
back at need what had once informed its surface with moving life!
I stared at the senseless glass, appealed to it with unreasoning frenzy, as
to something which could give up its secret if it would, but only to
meet my own features in every guise of fury and despair--features I no
longer knew--features which insensibly increased my horror till I tore
myself wildly from the spot, and cast about for further clues to
enlightenment, before yielding to the conviction which was making a
turmoil in mind, heart, and conscience. Alas! there was but little more
to see. A pair of curling-irons lay on the hearth, but I had no sooner
lifted them than I dropped them with a shudder of unspeakable loathing,
only to start at the noise they made in striking the tiles. For it was the
self-same noise I had heard when listening from below. These tongs,
set up against the side of the fireplace had been jarred down by the
forcible shutting of the large front door, and no man other than myself
was in the house, or had been in the house; only the two women. But
the time when this discovery would have brought comfort was passed.
Better a hundred times that a man--I had almost said any man--should
have been with them here, than that they should be closeted together in
a spot so secluded, with rancour and cause for complaint in one heart,

and a biting, deadly flame in the other, which once reaching up must
from its very nature leave behind it a corrosive impress. I saw,-I
felt,--but I did not desist from my investigations. A stick or two still
smouldered on the hearthstone. In the ashes lay some scattered
fragments of paper which crumbled at my touch. On the floor in front I
espied only a stray hair-pin; everything else was in place throughout
the room except the cushions and that horror on the lounge, waiting the
second look I had so far refrained from giving it.
That look I could no longer withhold. I must know the depth of the gulf
over which I hung. I must not wrong with a thought one who had