her handkerchief into her mouth, and in fierce dumb agony, tore it to shreds with hands and teeth.  Presently she rose, opened the door almost furtively, and stole softly down the stair, looking this way and that, like one intent on some evil deed.  At the bottom she pushed a green baize-covered door, peeped into a passage, then crept on tiptoe toward the surgery.  Arrived there she darted to a spot she knew, and stretched a trembling hand toward a bottle full of a dark-colored liquid.  As instantly she drew it back, and stood listening with bated breath and terrified look.  It was a footstep approaching the outer door of the surgery!  She turned and fled from it, still noiseless, and never stopped till she was in her own room.  There she shut and locked the door, fell on her knees by the bedside, and pressed her face into the coverlid.  She had no thought of praying.  She wanted to hide, only to hide.  Neither was it from old habit she fell upon her knees, for she had never been given to kneeling.  I can not but think, nevertheless, that there was a dumb germ of prayer at the heart of the action—­that falling upon her knees, and that hiding of her face.  The same moment something took place within her to which she could have given no name, which she could have represented in no words, a something which came she knew not whence, was she knew not what, and went she knew not whither, of which indeed she would never have become aware except for what followed, but which yet so wrought, that she rose from her knees saying to herself, with clenched teeth and burning eyes, “I will tell him.”

As if she had known the moment of her death near, she began mechanically to set every thing in order in the room, and as she came to herself she was saying, “Let him kill me.  I wish he would.  I am quite willing to die by his hand.  He will be kind, and do it gently.  He knows so many ways!”

It was a terrible day.  She did not go out of her room again.  Her mood changed a hundred times.  The resolve to confess alternated with wild mockery and laughter, but still returned.  She would struggle to persuade herself that her whole condition was one of foolish exaggeration, of senseless excitement about nothing—­the merest delirium of feminine fastidiousness; and the next instant would turn cold with horror at a fresh glimpse of the mere fact.  What could the wretched matter be to him now—­or to her?  Who was the worse, or had ever been the worse but herself?  And what did it amount to?  What claim had any one, what claim could even a God, if such a being there were, have upon the past which had gone from her, was no more in any possible sense within her reach than if it had never been?  Was it not as if it had never been?  Was the woman to be hurled—­to hurl herself into misery for the fault of the girl?  It was all nonsense—­a trifle at worst—­a disagreeable trifle, no doubt, but still a trifle!  Only would to God she had died rather—­even although then she would never have known Paul!—­Tut! she would never have thought of it again but for that horrid woman that lived over the draper’s shop!  All would have been well if she had but kept from thinking about it!  Nobody would have been a hair the worse then!—­But, poor Paul!—­to be married to such a woman as she!