strewn with litter, some of the furniture and boxes were broken, the
signs of violence could be seen everywhere. But if her search had at
first proved fruitless, there was that in her excitement and attitude
which led me to believe that she had found the mysterious documents at
last. I glanced at the bed, and professional instinct told me all that
had happened. The mattress had been flung contemptuously down by the
bedside, and across it, face downwards, lay the body of the Count,
like one of the paper envelopes that strewed the carpet--he too was
nothing now but an envelope. There was something grotesquely horrible
in the attitude of the stiffening rigid limbs.

"The dying man must have hidden the counter-deed under his pillow to
keep it safe so long as life should last; and his wife must have
guessed his thought; indeed, it might be read plainly in his last
dying gesture, in the convulsive clutch of his claw-like hands. The
pillow had been flung to the floor at the foot of the bed; I could see
the print of her heel upon it. At her feet lay a paper with the
Count's arms on the seals; I snatched it up, and saw that it was
addressed to me. I looked steadily at the Countess with the pitiless
clear-sightedness of an examining magistrate confronting a guilty
creature. The contents were blazing in the grate; she had flung them
on the fire at the sound of our approach, imagining, from a first
hasty glance at the provisions which I had suggested for her children,
that she was destroying a will which disinherited them. A tormented
conscience and involuntary horror of the deed which she had done had
taken away all power of reflection. She had been caught in the act,
and possibly the scaffold was rising before her eyes, and she already
felt the felon's branding iron.

"There she stood gasping for breath, waiting for us to speak, staring