A handsome residence on the south side of Queen Street had been the home of the prosperous ship-carpenter, William Zane. His name was on the door on a silver plate. As the evening deepened and the news spread, the bell was pulled so often that it aided the universal alarm following a crime, and a crowd of people, reinforced by others as fast as it thinned out, kept up the watch on ever-recurring friends, coroner's officers and newspaper reporters, as they ascended the steps, looked grave, made inquiries, and returned to dispense their information.

But there was very little indignation, for Zane had been an insanely passionate man, rather hard and exacting, and had he been found dead alone anywhere it would probably have been said at once that he brought it on himself. His partner, Rainey, however, had conducted himself so negatively and mildly, and was of such general estimation, that the murder of the senior member of the film took on some unusual public sympathy from the reflected sorrow for his fellow-victim. The latter had been one of Zane's apprentices, raised to a place in the establishment by his usefulness and sincere love of his patron. Just, forbearing, soft-spoken, and not avaricious, Sayler Rainey deserved no injury from any living being. He was unmarried, and, having met with a disappointment in love, had avowed his intention never to marry, but to bequeath all the property he should acquire to his partner's only son, Andrew Zane.

What, then, was the motive of this double murder? The public comprehension found but one theory, and that was freely advanced by the rash and imputative in the community of Kensington: The murderer was he who had the only known temptation and object in such a crime. Who could gain anything by it but Andrew Zane, the impulsive, the mischief-making and oft-restrained son of his stern sire, who, by a double crime, would inherit that undivided property, free from the control of both parent and guardian?

"It is parricide! that's what it is!" exclaimed a fat woman from Fishtown. "At the bottom of the river dead men tell no tales. The rebellious young sarpint of a son, who allus pulled a lusty oar, has chased them two older ones into the deep water of the channel, where a pistol shot can't be heard ashore, and he expected the property to be his'n. But there are gallowses yet, thank the Lord!"

"Mrs. Whann, don't say that," spoke up a deferential voice from the face of a rather sallow-skinned young man, with long, ringleted, yellow hair. "Don't create a prejudice, I beg of you. Andrew Zane was my classmate. He gave his excellent father some trouble, but it shouldn't be remembered against him now. Suppose, my friends, that you let me ring the bell and inquire?"

"Who's that?" asked the crowd. "He's a fine, mature-looking, charitable young man, anyway."

"Its the old Minister Van de Lear's son, Calvin. He's going to succeed his venerable and pious poppy in Kensington pulpit. They'll let him in."

The door closed when Calvin Van de Lear entered the residence of the late William Zane. When it reopened he was seen with a handkerchief in his hand and his hat pulled down over his eyes, as if he had been weeping.

"Stop! stop! don't be going off that way!" interposed the fat fishwife. "You said you would tell us the news."

"My friends," replied Calvin Van de Lear, with a look of the greatest pain, "Andrew Zane has not been heard from. I fear your suspicions are too true!"

He crossed the street and disappeared into the low and elderly residence of his parents.

"Alas! alas!" exclaimed a grave and gentle old man. "That Andrew Zane should not be here to meet a charge like this! But I'll not believe it till I have prayed with my God."

Within the Zane residence all was as in other houses on funeral eves. In the front parlor, ready for an inquest or an undertaker, lay the late master of the place, laid out, and all the visitors departed except his housekeeper, Agnes, and her friend, "Podge" Byerly. The latter was a sunny-haired and nimble little lady, under twenty years of age, who taught in one of the public schools and boarded with her former school-mate, Agnes Wilt. Agnes was an orphan of unknown parentage, by many supposed to have been a niece or relative of Mr. Zane's deceased wife, whose place she took at the head of the table, and had grown to be one of the principal social authorities in Kensington. In Reverend Mr. Van de Lear's church she was both teacher and singer. The young men of Kensington were all in love with her, but it was generally understood that she had accepted Andrew Zane, and was engaged to him.

Andrew was not dissipated, but was fond of pranks, and so restive under his father's positive hand that he twice ran away to distant seaports, and thus incurred a remarkable amount of intuitive gossip, such as belongs to all old settled suburban societies. This occasional firmness of character in the midst of a generally light and flexible life, now told against him in the public mind. "He has nerve enough to do anything desperate in a pinch," exclaimed the very wisest. "Didn't William Zane find him out once in the island of Barbadoes grubbing sugar-cane with a hoe, and the thermometer at 120 in the shade? And didn't he swear he'd stay there and die unless concessions were made to him, and certain things never brought up again? Didn't even his iron-shod father have to give way before he would come home? Ah! Andrew is light-hearted, but he is an Indian in self-will!"

To-night Agnes was in the deepest grief. Upon her, and only her, fell the whole burden of this double crime and mystery, ten times more terrible that her lover was compromised and had disappeared.

"Go to bed, Podge!" said Agnes, as the clock in the engine-house struck midnight. "Oblige me, my dear! I cannot sleep, and shall wait and watch. Perhaps Andrew will be here."

"I can't leave you up, Aggy, and with that thing so near." She locked toward the front parlor, where, behind the folding-doors, lay the dead.

"I have no fear of that. He was always kind to me. My fears are all in this world. O darling!"

She burst into sobs. Her friend kissed her again and again, and knew that feelings between love and crime extorted that last word.

"Aggy," spoke the light-hearted girl, "I know that you cannot help loving him, and as long as he is loved by you I sha'n't believe him guilty. Must I really leave you here?"

Her weeping friend turned up her face to give the mandatory kiss, and Podge was gone.

Agnes sat in solitude, with her hands folded and her heart filled with unutterable tender woe, that so much causeless cloud had settled upon the home of her refuge. She could not experience that relief many of us feel in deep adversity, that it is all illusion, and will in a moment float away like other dreams. Brought to this house an orphan, and twice deprived of a mother's love, she had only entered woman's estate when another class of cares beset her. Her beauty and sweetness of disposition had brought her more lovers than could make her happy. There was but one on whom she could confer her heart, and this natural choice had drawn around her the perils which now overwhelmed them all. Accepting the son, she incurred the father's resentment upon both; for he, the dead man yonder, had also been her lover.

"Oh, my God!" exclaimed the anguished woman, kneeling by her chair and laying her cheek upon it, while only such tears as we shed in supreme moments saturated her handkerchief, "what have I done to make such misery to others? How sinful I must be to set son and father against each other! Yet, Heavenly Father, I can but love!"

There was a cracking of something, as if the dead man in the great, black parlor had carried his jealousy beyond his doom and was breaking from his coffin to upbraid her. A door burst open in the dining-room, which was behind her, and then the dining-room door also unclosed, and was followed by a cold, graveyard draft. A moment of superstition possessed Agnes. "Guard me, Saviour," she murmured.

At the dining-room threshold, advancing a little over the sill, as if to rush upon her, was the figure of a man, dressed, head to foot, in sailor's garments—heavy woollens, comforter, tarpaulin overalls, and knit cap. He looked at her an instant, standing there, shivering, and then he retired a pace or two and closed the door to the cellar, by which he had entered the house. Even this little movement in the intruder had something familiar about it. He advanced again, directly and rapidly, toward her, but she did not scream. He threw both arms around her, and she did not cry. Something had entered with that bold figure which extinguished all crime and superstition in the monarchy of its presence—Love.

A kiss, as fervent and long as only the reunited ever give with purity, drew the soul of the suspected murderer and his sweetheart into one temple.

"Agnes," he whispered hoarsely, when it was given, "they have followed me hard to-night. Every place I might have resorted to is watched. All Kensington—my oldest friends—believe me guilty! I cannot face it. With this kiss I must go."

"Oh, Andrew, do not! Here is the place to make your peace; here take your stand and await the worst."

"Agnes," he repeated, "I have no defence. Nothing but silence would defend me now, and that would hang me to the gallows. I come to put my life and soul into your hands. Can you pray for me, bad as I am?"

"Dear Andrew," answered Agnes, weeping fast, "I have no power to stop you, and I cannot give you up. Yes, I will pray for you now, before you start on your journey. Go open those folding-doors and we will pray in the other room."

"What is there?"

"Your father."

He stopped a long while, and his cheek was blanched.

"Go first," he whispered finally. "I am not afraid."

She led the way to the bier, where the body, with the frost hardly yet thawed from it, lay under the dim light of the chandelier. Turning up the burners it was revealed in its relentless, though not unhappy, expression—a large and powerful man, bearded and with tassels of gray in his hair.

The young man in his coarse sailor's garb, muffled up for concealment and disguise, placed his arm around Agnes, and his knees were unsteady as he gazed down on the remains and began to sob.

"Dear," she murmured, also weeping, "I know you loved him!"

The young man's sobs became so loud that Agnes drew him to a chair, and as she sat upon it he laid his head in her lap and continued there to express a deep inward agony.

"I loved him always," he articulated at last, "so help me God, I did! And a parricide! Can you survive it?"

"Andrew," she replied, "I have taken it all to heaven and laid the sin there. Forever, my darling, intercession continues for all our offences only there. It must be our recourse in this separation every day when we rise and lie down. Though blood-stained, he can wash as white as snow."

"I will try, I will try!" he sobbed; "but your goodness is my reliance, dearest. I have always been disobedient to my father, but never thought it would come to this."

"Nor I, Andrew. Poor, rash uncle!"

"Agnes," whispered Andrew Zane, rising with a sudden fear, "I hear people about the house—on the pavement, on the doorsteps. Perhaps they are suspecting me. I must fly. Oh! shall we ever meet again under a brighter sky? Will you cling to me? I am going out, abandoned by all the world. Nothing is left me but your fidelity. Will it last? You know you are beautiful!"

"Oh, sad words to say!" sighed Agnes. "Let none but you ever say them to me again. Beautiful, and to the end of such misery as this! My only love, I will never forsake you!"

"Then I can try the world again, winter as it is. Once more, oh, God! let me ask forgiveness from these frozen lips. My father! pursue me not, though deep is my offence! Farewell, farewell forever!"

He disappeared down the cellar as he had come, and Agnes heard at the outer window the sound of his escaping. When all was silent she fell to the floor, and lay there helplessly weeping.