So God had sundered whom God had joined together! And this was the man whom she had married for love; and she could look upon his clay unmoved! Her mind leapt to a minor consideration, that still made her shudder, as eight eyes noted from the door; he must have been dead when she came down and found him seated in shadow; she had misjudged the dead, if not the living.

The pose of the head was unaltered, the chin upon the chest, the mouth closed in death as naturally as in sleep.

No wonder his wife had been deceived.

And yet there was something unfamiliar, something negligent and noble, and all unlike the living man; so that Rachel could already marvel that she had not at once detected this dignity and this distinction, only too foreign to her husband as she had learnt to know him best, but unattainable in the noblest save by death.

And her eyes had risen to the slice of sky in the upper half of the window, and at last the tears were rising in her eyes, when they filled instead with sudden horror and enlightenment.
There was a jagged hole in the pane above the hasp; an upset of ink on the desk beneath the window; and the ink was drying with the dead man's blood, in which she now perceived him to be soaked, while the newspaper on the floor beside him was crisp as toast from that which it had hidden when she saw him last.
"Murdered!" whispered Rachel, breaking her long silence with a gasp.
"The work of thieves!" The policemen exchanged a rapid glance.
"Looks like it," said the one who had opened the door, "I admit." There was a superfluous dryness in his tone; but Rachel no more noticed this than the further craning of heads in the doorway.
"But can you doubt it ?" she cried, pointing from the broken window to the spilled ink.