The Cotton Factory Times. — 1914-01-30 (Manchester, Greater Manchester, England)

MORTON LEWIS. ; El,lolo9,ll,elleriC4V6tGOOW Gai  Mrs. Charles Vilkiers Eat in the drawing-rn. A largo fire burned in the open grate, throwing beams of light amidst the shadows. The mom was furnished with a taste that spoke of the artistic temperament in its owner. Once she sighed heavily, and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. Its hand pointed to a quarter to ten.  Judged by the measure of the common world, Mrs. Villiers should have been a happy woman. The wife of Charles Villiers, the eminent BA., whose brush had brought him a fortune, she lacked nothing. Yet Destiny had made a merry jig of her life, for its own edification, as it does with those of many folk. Barely thirty, abs ' looked back upon a life which had seen more than its just share of sorrow. Mentally she reviewed it. At twenty-two, the daughter of rich parents, she had left home to mars-y. She had two lovers, and she chose the lighter-hearted, more boyish of the two. For three years their life together had been idyllic. They were eminently suited, the only shadow which cast its reflection across her path was the memory of the other man, the one she had refused. Then. corning home late one night, she had found her husband murdered. She had fainted as she saw him lying in a pool of his oan blood, a knife penetrating through his heart. It was a cruel blow, one which had been struck from behind, with the strength of a madman. For three months she lay prostrated, hevering between life and death. When she recovered the grass had commenced to grow upon her husband's grave, but his death had been unavonged. With a cunning that was almost superhuman, tire murderer had concealed every trace of his personality—every else.  Then it was she learned that whilst she had lain prostrate her parents had suffered a lose which, though not as great as hers, had altered the whole tenour of their life. She had left them in a large house. She recovered to find them in a small cottage, whither they had gone to live upon the remains of their fortune. 1 Six months later the other man entire back into her life, and she married him. flea second married life was not a happy one, and she lived woman existin, only in a happy memory, ono not even blessed' by a child, which might have proved a link with the husband she had lost. Charles Villiers Was one of those men of whom the world in general is permitted to see little. To his friends be was the genial R.A.. whom success had left unspoiled. .To his wife only was the real Charles Villiers known. A roan of morose and sullen temperament, given to wild attacks of almost bestial savagery and jealousy. He had married her, thinking he loved her, to find that he loved no one, nothing, except himself and his own work. So gradually she had drifted to living within herself a lonely woman, dwelling only in the past. That evening she felt snore than usually wretched. It was the fifth anniversary of the evening when sue had gone home to find her husband murdered. "I wonder who it could possibly have been," she said: "them was no one who disliked Diek. Everybody loved him." The sound of voices broke into her reverie; the door opened and her husband entered with a friend.  It was after Mrs. Villiers had gone to bed. The two men were sitting up in the Library, smoking and talking. The smoke from their cigars curled around some of the finest pieces of statuary to be seen in any private collection in England. 'Villiers woe wiatching his friend through half-closed eyes. "Yea," Patterson was saying, "it is ~the old story that Edgar Allen Poe wrote: The TellTale Heart.' A man cannot keep a secret like that for ever to hirneelf. Sooner or later he most tell someone. It weighs him down; he feels he must shriek it out in the market place, until the very physiowl effort of keeping silence upon the one point ckives him mad. Who would have thought that Du Croix, that exquisite-minded little 'dilettante, was a murderer?"  " Eh?" Vinif;ra looced--;;;;;d4en1y. "And for Svc yearn he had kept his secret. And then on the fifth anniversary he had to tell sogneone. And he is mad now—mad no a hattor. Strange, isn't it?"