Confession of Edgerton

When within his chamber, he carefully fastened the door and placed
a packet in my hands.

"This is addressed to you," he said. "I found it on the table
with other papers, and seeing the address, and fearing that if the
jury laid eyes on it, they might insist on knowing its contents, I
thrust it into my pocket and said nothing about it there. Read it
at your leisure, while I smoke a cigar below."

He left me, and I opened the seal with a sense of misgiving and
apprehension for which I could not easily account. The outer packet
was addressed to myself. But the envelope contained several other
papers, one of which was addressed to his father; another--a small
billet, unsealed--bore the name of my wife upon it.

"That," I inly (sic) muttered, "she shall never read!"

An instant after, I trembled with a convulsive horror, as the demon
who had whispered in my ears so long, seemed to say, in mocking
accents:-"Shall not! Ha! ha! She can not! can not!" and then the fiend
seemed to chuckle, and I remembered the insuppressible anguish of
Othello's apostrophe, to make all its eloquence my own. I murmured
audibly:-"My wife! my wife! What wife?--I have no wife!
Oh, insupportable--oh, heavy hour!"

My eyes were blinded. My face sunk down upon the table, and a cold
shiver shook my frame as if I had an ague. But I recovered myself
when I remembered the wrongs I had endured--her guilt and the guilt
of Edgerton. I clutched the papers--brushed the big drops from my
forehead, and read.