"Yes, I have a clue, Paul."
"You have? What is it? Why have you never spoken of it before?"
"Because of its seeming unimportance. The clue is so slight, that it would be considered none at all, by others less interested than myself."
"What is it, then? At least allow me the privilege of knowing, and judging of its importance."
"I am about to do so," said Miriam, and she commenced and told him all she knew, and also all she suspected of the circumstances that preceded the assassination on the beach. In conclusion, she informed him of the letters in her possession.
"And where are now those letters, Miriam? What are they like? What is their purport? It seems to me that they would not only give a hint, but afford direct evidence against that demoniac assassin. And it seems strange to me that they were not examined, with a view to that end."
"Paul, they were; but they did not point out the writer, even. There was a note among them—a note soliciting a meeting with Marian, upon the very evening, and upon the very spot when and where the murder was committed! But that note contains nothing to indicate the identity of its author. There are, besides, a number of foreign letters written in French, and signed 'Thomas Truman,' no French name, by-the-bye, a circumstance which leads me to believe that it must have been an assumed one."
"And those French letters give no indication of the writer, either?"
"I am not sufficiently acquainted with that language to read it in manuscript, which, you know, is much more difficult than print. But I presume they point to nothing definitely, for my dear mother showed them to Mr. Willcoxen, who took the greatest interest in the discovery of the murderer, and he told her that those letters afforded not the slightest clue to the perpetrator of the crime, and that whoever might have been the assassin, it certainly could not have been the author of those letters. He wished to take them with him, but mother declined to give them up; she thought it would be disrespect to Marian's memory to give her private correspondence up to a stranger, and so she told him. He then said that of all men, certainly he had the least right to claim them, and so the matter rested. But mother always believed they held the key to the discovery of the guilty party; and afterward she left them to me, with the charge that I should never suffer them to pass from my possession until they had fulfilled their destiny of witnessing against the murderer—for whatever Mr. Willcoxen might think, mother felt convinced that the writer of those letters and the murderer of Marian was the same person."
"Tell me more about those letters."