Clement could not thoroughly believe in the baseness of the woman he had
trusted. Again and again he went over the same ground, trying to find
some lurking circumstance, no matter how unlikely in its nature, which
should explain and justify Margaret's conduct.
Sometimes in his dreams he saw the familiar face looking at him with
pensive, half-reproachful glances; and then a dark figure that was
strange to him came between him and that gentle shadow, and thrust the
vision away with a ruthless hand. At last, by dint of going over the
ground again and again, always pleading Margaret's cause against the
stern witness of cruel facts, Clement came to look upon the girl's
innocence as a settled thing.
There was falsehood and treachery in the business, but Margaret Wilmot
was neither false nor treacherous. There was a mystery, and Henry Dunbar
was at the bottom of it.
"It seems as if the spirit of the murdered man troubled our lives, and
cried to us for vengeance," Clement thought. "There will be no peace for
us until the secret of the deed done in the grove near Winchester has
been brought to light."
This thought, working night and day in Clement Austin's brain, gave rise
to a fixed resolve. Before he went back to the quiet routine of life, he
set himself a task to accomplish, and that task was the solution of the
Winchester mystery.
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