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.