As soon as she was gone, he tore it apart, trembling. As he read
and read the suspicion within him deepened quickly into a doubt,
the doubt into a conviction, the conviction into a certainty. He
clapped his hands to his head. Oh, God, what was this? Guy acknowledged
his own guilt! He confessed he had done it!
Cyril's last hope was gone. Guy himself admitted it!
"How I came to do it," the letter said, "I've no idea myself. A
sudden suggestion--a strange, unaccountable impulse--a prompting,
as it were, pressed upon me from without, and almost before I knew,
the crime was committed."
Cyril bent his head low upon his knees with shame. He never
could hold up that head henceforth. No further doubt or hesitation
remained. He knew the whole truth. Guy was indeed a murderer.
He steeled himself for the worst, and read the letter through
with a superhuman effort. It almost choked him to read. The very
consecutiveness and coherency of the sentences seemed all but
incredible under such awful circumstances. A murderer, red-handed,
to speak of his crime so calmly as that! And then, too, this undying
anger expressed and felt, even after death, against his victim
Nevitt! Cyril couldn't understand how any man--least of all his own
brother--could write such words about the murdered man whose body
was then lying all silent and cold, under the open sky, among the
bracken at Mambury.
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