Her blood curdling with horror, Barbara found no voice, no strength, to speak or stir; but she became, so to speak, all eye; and as the murderer, swiftly cramming into his hat and pockets something which she could not define, rose up, and forgetful of the cudgel, which lay blood-dabbled on the grass, rushed from the place where he had taken the burden of a deadly sin upon his soul, she saw his face, and recognized her father's sexton—David Bain.
In terror, that found no tongue, she reached her lover, and became insensible; nor was it till her recovery, when she found herself alone with her aunt, that she felt how important to her future life might be the events of that night. She resolved, ere yet she spoke one word in reply to the questions of her aunt, to ascribe her swoon to anything but the real cause; and it was, perhaps, well she so determined, for she remembered that, in her flight from the fatal spot where she had witnessed the perpetration of so foul a deed, she had picked up a letter, which she had hid in her bosom, scarcely conscious of what she did, yet, perhaps, imperceptibly aware—with the foresight of inexplicable convictions—that it might yet prove of essential service. When she retired to her chamber, and had got rid of Aunt Henny, she took the paper from its concealment, and saw that it was the empty cover of a letter addressed to "Mr. Bruce, at the house of David Bain, Sexton;" and then the certainty struck her of the murdered man being her affianced husband.
The character of David Bain was marked by extreme avarice, and Barbara's conclusions as to the instigating cause of the crime he had committed were easily formed. But what means could she pursue in order to convict guilt, without at the same time rendering her own appearance before a public court of justice necessary? from which she shrank nervously, since the cause of her presence in such a spot, and at such an hour, must of course be revealed. A sudden thought struck her—and, wild as it was, she put it into instant execution. She knew her father's belief in supernatural agency, and trusted strongly to the effect such a document as that which she now prepared would have upon him. She wrote the note which Mr. Comyn discovered in the Bible, imitating Mr. Bruce's hand, which was peculiar, as closely as she could; and then, when the minister left it there—a circumstance which, though she did not foresee, rejoiced her—she subtracted it thence, uninterrupted and unsuspected. But when it pleased the Almighty to make manifest the murderer by the means thus strangely suggested to her, she confessed the whole to the indulgent Henny and her lover, and by their advice took the magistrate also into her confidence.
We have nothing more to relate, but that Barbara Comyn and John Percival were soon after united by the worthy minister; whilst Miss Henny was as busy as a bee in preparations for the wedding, and as happy in witnessing the happiness of others as if she had never known a care of her own.
Thiers has abandoned politics and history for the summer to visit England.