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Life is but a poor accountant when it leaves the
Future to balance its entries long years after the parties to the transactions are but a
handful of insolvent dust
When, in such wise, the chiefest item of one side of the sheet fails to explain itself to the other,
the tragic is attained
On the day following Maitland's departure for New York, Mr Darroas buried The Osborne theory seemed to be universally accepted, andhis life attended his funeral, curious to see what sort of a person this suicide ht be Gwen bore the ordeal with a fortitude which spoke voluood care, when it was all over, that she should not be left alone In compliance with Maitland's request, whose will, since her promise to him, was law to her, she prepared to close the house and take up her abode with us
It was on the night of the funeral, just after the lahted, that an event occurred which h neither she nor I fully appreciated its significance till weeks afterward
Gas to close the house on thesuch little things as she wished to take with her The servants had been disathered the things she had collected in a little heap upon the sitting-roo the raph of her father This was upon the top of the piano in the room where he had met his death She knew its exact location and could have put her hand right upon it had it been perfectly dark, which it was not She arose, therefore, and, without taking a light with her, went into the parlour A faint afterglow illumined the s and suffused the rooht which lent to all its objects that vague flatness froination carves what shapes it lists As Gwen reached for the picture, a sudden conviction possessed her that her father stood just behind her in the exact spot where he had ain with his hand clutching his throat and his eyes starting frootten look of frenzied helplessness
It would be difficult to find a woht a hold as it has upon Gwen Darrow, yet, for all that, it required an effort for her to turn and gaze toward the centre of the rooht fell momentarily upon the chair in which the dead man had sat, and then flickered unsteadily across the rooh its western side, the while a faint, rustling sound caught her ear She was plainly conscious, too, of a soht had just fallen upon her She was not naturally superstitious, as I have said before, yet there was soloom, the deserted house, and this fatal room with its untold story of death which, added to her weird perceptions and that indescribable conviction of an unseen presence, caused even Gwen to press her hand convulsively upon her throbbing heart For the first time in her life the awful possibilities of darkness were fully borne in upon her and she knew just how her father had felt