“Find what?”
“Where the murdered man had lain there was no trace of fire. The flames had burned round, but touched him not, there I found them.”
“Woman, tell me what you found, or—”
“Or what?” cried. Maud, her eyes flashing upon the cowardly Gray, who immediately shrunk back, saying,—
“Nothing—I—want nothing. Only I am anxious to know what you found.”
“You are? Well, well, I found some of these. Here is one.”
As she spoke, she took from her breast a small torn scrap of paper and gazed at it attentively.
In an instant Gray surmised the truth. In his attempt to get rid of his written confession while standing on the ladder, previous to the murder of Elias, he had dropped many pieces, and then in the exciting scenes that followed utterly forgotten them. Once indeed, while in the tree on Hampstead Heath, he remembered the circumstance, but then he immediately assumed that they had been burnt along with the house.
He now trembled in every limb, as the thought came over him, that possibly the poor mad creature might have collected sufficient of the torn pieces to give Sir Francis Hartleton a tangible idea of the whole; and although he felt that, next thing to his life, was the repossession of those torn scraps, he was so overcome by the circumstance of their thus coming to light, that for a few moments he thought he should have fainted.
Maud, meanwhile spread out the small crumpled pieces of paper in her hand, and commenced reading in a low muttering voice, “Andrew Britton”—“the temptation”—“a double murder”—“shrieking”—“the child”—“guilt—”