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336 again offer to woman—the first deep love of a strong nature—a love that burns itself into heart and mind as aquafortis into steel. He had come to her stained with blood-guiltiness—an unconfessed assassin—holding his head high among his fellow-men, playing the good citizen, the generous landlord, the patron, the benefactor—he who had slain the widow's only son. He had lived a double life, hiding his pleasures, lest his gains should be lessened by men's knowledge of his lighter hours. He, who had seemed to her the very spirit of truth and honour, had been steeped to the lips in falsehood—a creature of masks and semblances. This it was which bowed her to the dust; this it was which weighed upon her spirits as no common loss could have done.

With her own hands she explored her husband's desk and despatch-boxes—the receptacles for all his more important papers—in search of any written confession which should attest the dead man's guilt, and for ever establish Bothwell's innocence. It would have been unutterable agony to her to have made such a confession public—to have let the curious eyes of the world peer in upon that story of guilt and shame; yet had any such document existed, she would have deemed it her duty to make it public—her duty to her kinsman, who had been made the scapegoat of another man's crimes. Happily for her peace there was no such paper to be found—not a line, not a word which hinted at the dead man's secret; and happily for Bothwell the cloud that had hung over him had by this time dispersed. The steadiness with which he had held his ground in the neighbourhood, the fact of his engagement to Miss Heathcote, had weighed with his Bodmin traducers; and those who had been the first to hint their suspicions were now the readiest to protest against the infamy of such an idea. Had Bothwell emigrated immediately after the inquest at the Vital Spark, these same people would have gone down to the grave convinced that he was the murderer.

But before the end of that year there occurred an event which was considered an all-sufficient proof of Bothwell's innocence, and an easy solution of the mystery of the unknown girl's death. A miner entered a solitary farmhouse between Bodmin and Lostwithiel, in the dim gray of a winter evening, and killed two harmless women-folk—an old woman and a young one—for the sake of a very small booty. He was caught red-handed, tried, convicted, and hanged in Bodmin Gaol: but although he confessed nothing, and died a hardened impenitent miner, it was believed by every one in the place that his was the pitiless hand which had sent the French girl to her doom.

"She had a little bit o' money about her, maybe, poor lass, and he took it from her, and when she screamed he pushed her out of the train. Such a man would think no more of doing it