"Miriam, you are mad!"
"Oh! well for me, and better still for you, if I were mad!"
He was tremendously shaken, more by the vivid memories she recalled than by the astounding charge she made.
"In the name of Heaven, what leads you to imagine such impossible guilt!"
"Good knowledge of the facts—that this month, eight years ago, in the little Methodist chapel of the navy yard, in Washington City, you made Marian Mayfield your wife—that this night seven years since, in just such a storm as this, on the beach below Pine Bluff, you met and murdered Marian Willcoxen! And, moreover, I as sure you, that these facts which I tell you now, to-morrow I will lay before a magistrate, together with all the corroborating proof in my possession!"
"And what proof can you have?"
"A gentleman who, unknown and unsuspected, witnessed the private ceremony between yourself and Marian; a packet of French letters, written by yourself from Glasgow, to Marian, in St. Mary's, in the spring of 1823; a note found in the pocket of her dress, appointing the fatal meeting on the beach where she perished. Two physicians, who can testify to your unaccountable absence from the deathbed of your parent on the night of the murder, and also to the distraction of your manner when you returned late the next morning."
"And this," said Thurston, gazing in mournful amazement upon her; "this is the child that I have nourished and brought up in my house! She can believe me guilty of such atrocious crime—she can aim at my honor and my life such a deadly blow?"
"Alas! alas! it is my duty! it is my fate! I cannot escape it! I have bound my soul by a fearful oath! I cannot evade it! I shall not survive it! Oh, all the heaven is black with doom, and all the earth tainted with blood!" cried Miriam, wildly.
"You are insane, poor girl! you are insane!" said Thurston, pityingly.