“The head of the bedstead was set against the wall which divided his room from mine.  From looking at the bedstead I got to looking at the wall next.  Then to wondering what it was made of.  Then to rapping against it with my knuckles.  The sound told me there was nothing but lath and plaster under the paper.  It was the same as the wall we had been at work on down stairs.  We had cleared our way so far through this last—­in certain places where the repairs were most needed—­that we had to be careful not to burst through the paper in the room on the other side.  I found myself calling to mind the caution my husband had given me while we were at this part of the work, word for word as he had spoken it. ’Take care you don’t find your hands in the next room.’ That was what he had said down in the parlor.  Up in his bedroom I kept on repeating it in my own mind—­with my eyes all the while on the key, which he had moved to the inner side of the door to lock himself in—­till the knowledge of what it meant burst on me like a flash of light.  I looked at the wall, at the bedhead, at my own two hands—­and I shivered as if it was winter time.

“Hours must have passed like minutes while I was up stairs that night.  I lost all count of time.  When my husband came up from his drinking, he found me in his room.”

10.

“I leave the rest untold, and pass on purposely to the next morning.

“No mortal eyes but mine will ever see these lines.  Still, there are things a woman can’t write of even to herself.  I shall only say this.  I suffered the last and worst of many indignities at my husband’s hands—­at the very time when I first saw, set plainly before me, the way to take his life.  He went out toward noon next day, to go his rounds among the public houses; my mind being then strung up to deliver myself from him, for good and all, when he came back at night.

“The things we had used on the previous day were left in the parlor.  I was all by myself in the house, free to put in practice the lesson he had taught me.  I proved myself an apt scholar.  Before the lamps were lit in the street I had my own way prepared (in my bedroom and in his) for laying my own hands on him—­after he had locked himself up for the night.

“I don’t remember feeling either fear or doubt through all those hours.  I sat down to my bit of supper with no better and no worse an appetite than usual.  The only change in me that I can call to mind was that I felt a singular longing to have somebody with me to keep me company.  Having no friend to ask in, I went to the street door and stood looking at the people passing this way and that.

“A stray dog, sniffing about, came up to me.  Generally I dislike dogs and beasts of all kinds.  I called this one in and gave him his supper.  He had been taught (I suppose) to sit up on his hind-legs and beg for food; at any rate, that was his way of asking me for more.  I laughed—­it seems impossible when I look back at it now, but for all that it’s true—­I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks, at the little beast on his haunches, with his ears pricked up and his head on one side and his mouth watering for the victuals.  I wonder whether I was in my right senses?  I don’t know.