The murdered youth wore the features of Edward Spencer . `` What does this rascal of a painter mean ? '' cries Mr. Smith , provoked beyond all patience . `` Edward Spencer was my earliest and dearest friend , true to me as I to him through more than half a century . Neither I nor any other ever murdered him . Was he not alive within five years , and did he not , in token of our long friendship , bequeath me his gold-headed cane and a mourning-ring ? '' Again had Memory been turning over her volume , and fixed at length upon so confused a page that she surely must have scribbled it when she was tipsy . The purport was , however , that while Mr. Smith and Edward Spencer were heating their young blood with wine a quarrel had flashed up between them , and Mr. Smith , in deadly wrath , had flung a bottle at Spencer 's head . True , it missed its aim and merely smashed a looking-glass ; and the next morning , when the incident was imperfectly remembered , they had shaken hands with a hearty laugh . Yet , again , while Memory was reading , Conscience unveiled her face , struck a dagger to the heart of Mr. Smith and quelled his remonstrance with her iron frown . The pain was quite excruciating . Some of the pictures had been painted with so doubtful a touch , and in colors so faint and pale , that the subjects could barely be conjectured . A dull , semi-transparent mist had been thrown over the surface of the canvas , into which the figures seemed to vanish while the eye sought most earnestly to fix them . But in every scene , however dubiously portrayed , Mr. Smith was invariably haunted by his own lineaments at various ages as in a dusty mirror . After poring several minutes over one of these blurred and almost indistinguishable pictures , he began to see that the painter had intended to represent him , now in the decline of life , as stripping the clothes from the backs of three half-starved children . `` Really , this puzzles me ! '' quoth Mr. Smith , with the irony of conscious rectitude . `` Asking pardon of the painter , I pronounce him a fool as well as a scandalous knave . A man of my standing in the world to be robbing little children of their clothes ! Ridiculous ! ''
But XXXXX he spoke Memory had searched her fatal volume and found a page which with her sad calm voice she poured into his ear .
at beyond by in of than that to while with