and wished to be excused. The servant's manner confirmed my instant
suspicion. I had looked for this; yet was not the pang it gave me
less acute for the anticipation? Was I not the instrumental cause of
a great calamity that had wrecked her dearest hope in life? And how
could she bear to see my face?

I went home very heavy-hearted. My husband tried to comfort me with
words that had no balm for either his troubled heart or mine. The
great fact of our having put the cup of confusion to that young
man's lips, and sent him forth at midnight in no condition to find
his way home, stood out too sharply defined for any self-delusion.

I did not venture to the house of my friend again. She had dropped a
curtain between us, and I said, "It shall be a wall of separation."

Not until spring opened was the body of Albert Martindale recovered.
It was found floating in the dock, at the end of the street down
which young Gordon saw him go with unsteady steps in the darkness
and storm on that night of sorrow. His watch was in his pocket, the
hands pointing to half-past two, the time, in all probability, when
he fell into the water. The diamond pin was in his scarf, and his
pocket-book in his pocket, unrifled. He had not been robbed and
murdered. So much was certain. To all it was plain that the
bewildered young man, left to himself, had plunged on blindly
through the storm, going he knew not whither, until he reached the
wharf. The white sheet of snow lying over everything hid from eyes
like his the treacherous margin, and he stepped, unheeding, to his
death! It was conjectured that his body had floated, by an incoming
tide, under the wharf, and that his clothes had caught in the logs
and held it there for so long a time.