I must tell the whole truth, however terrible and humiliating it may be.  Whether I had been true or false to myself up to that moment I cannot say.  I had taken upon myself the care, and, if possible, the cure of this man, who was my enemy, if I had an enemy in the world.  His life and mine could not run parallel without great grief and hurt to me, and to one dearer than myself.  Now that a better chance was thrust upon me in his favor, I shrank from seizing it with unutterable reluctance.  I turned heart-sick at the thought of it.  I tried my utmost to shake off the grip of my memory.  Was it possible that, in the core of my heart, I wished this man to die?

Yes, I wished him to die.  Conscience flashed the answer across the inner depths of my soul, as a glare of lightning over the sharp crags and cruel waves of our island in a midnight storm.  I saw with terrible distinctness that there had been lurking within a sure sense of satisfaction in the certainty that he must die.  I had suspected nothing of it till that moment.  When I told him it was the instinct of a physician to save his patient, I spoke the truth.  But I found something within me deeper than instinct, that was wailing and watching for the fatal issue of his malady, with a tranquil security so profound that it never stirred the surface of my consciousness, or lifted up its ghostly face to the light of conscience.

I took up my note-book, and went away to my room, lest Jack should come in suddenly, and read my secret on my face.  I thrust the book into a drawer in my desk, and locked it away out of my sight.  What need had I to trouble myself with it or its contents?  I found a book, one of Charles Dickens’s most amusing stories, and set myself resolutely to read it; laughing aloud at its drolleries, and reading faster and faster; while all the time thoughts came crowding into my mind of my mother’s pale, worn face, and the pains she suffered, and the remedy found out too late.  These images grew so strong at last that my eyes ran over the sentences mechanically, but my brain refused to take in the meaning of them.  I threw the book from me; and, leaning my head on my hands, I let all the waves of that sorrowful memory flow over me.

How strong they were! how persistent!  I could hear the tones of her languid voice, and see the light lingering to the last in her dim eyes, whenever they met mine.  A shudder crept through me as I recollected how she travelled that dolorous road, slowly, day by day, down to the grave.  Other feet were beginning to tread the same painful journey; but there was yet time to stay them, and the power to do it was intrusted to me.  What was I to do with my power?

It seemed cruel that this power should come to me from my mother’s death.  If she were living still, or if she had died from any other cause, the discovery of this remedy would never have been made by me.  And I was to take it as a sort of miraculous gift, purchased by her pangs, and bestow it upon the only man I hated.  For I hated him; I said so to myself, muttering the words between my teeth.