“Horrid—­I am well aware this is horrid.  Nobody else, in my place, would have ended as wickedly as that.  All the other women in the world, tried as I was, would have risen superior to the trial.”

9.

“I have said that people (excepting my husband and my relations) were almost always good to me.

“The landlord of the house which we had taken when we were married heard of my sad case.  He gave me one of his empty houses to look after, and a little weekly allowance for doing it.  Some of the furniture in the upper rooms, not being wanted by the last tenant, was left to be taken at a valuation if the next tenant needed it.  Two of the servants’ bedrooms (in the attics), one next to the other, had all that was wanted in them.  So I had a roof to cover me, and a choice of beds to lie on, and money to get me food.  All well again—­but all too late.  If that house could speak, what tales that house would have to tell of me!

“I had been told by the doctors to exercise my speech.  Being all alone, with nobody to speak to, except when the landlord dropped in, or when the servant next door said, ‘Nice day, ain’t it?’ or, ’Don’t you feel lonely?’ or such like, I bought the newspaper, and read it out loud to myself to exercise my speech in that way.  One day I came upon a bit about the wives of drunken husbands.  It was a report of something said on that subject by a London coroner, who had held inquests on dead husbands (in the lower ranks of life), and who had his reasons for suspecting the wives.  Examination of the body (he said) didn’t prove it; and witnesses didn’t prove it; but he thought it, nevertheless, quite possible, in some cases, that, when the woman could bear it no longer, she sometimes took a damp towel, and waited till the husband (drugged with his own liquor) was sunk in his sleep, and then put the towel over his nose and mouth, and ended it that way without any body being the wiser.  I laid down the newspaper; and fell into thinking.  My mind was, by this time, in a prophetic way.  I said to myself ’I haven’t happened on this for nothing:  this means that I shall see my husband again.’

“It was then just after my dinner-time—­two o’clock.  That same night, at the moment when I had put out my candle, and laid me down in bed, I heard a knock at the street door.  Before I had lit my candle I says to myself, ‘Here he is.’

“I huddled on a few things, and struck a light, and went down stairs.  I called out through the door, ‘Who’s there?’ And his voice answered, ’Let me in.’

“I sat down on a chair in the passage, and shook all over like a person struck with palsy.  Not from the fear of him—­but from my mind being in the prophetic way.  I knew I was going to be driven to it at last.  Try as I might to keep from doing it, my mind told me I was to do it now.  I sat shaking on the chair in the passage; I on one side of the door, and he on the other.

“He knocked again, and again, and again.  I knew it was useless to try—­and yet I resolved to try.  I determined not to let him in till I was forced to it.  I determined to let him alarm the neighborhood, and to see if the neighborhood would step between us.  I went up stairs and waited at the open staircase window over the door.