11.

“The rest of this history is counted in my mind by four days—­Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.  After that it all fades off like, and the new years come with a strange look, being the years of a new life.

“What about the old life first?  What did I feel, in the horrid quiet of the morning, when I had done it?

“I don’t know what I felt.  I can’t remember it, or I can’t tell it, I don’t know which.  I can write the history of the four days, and that’s all.

“Wednesday.—­I gave the alarm toward noon.  Hours before, I had put things straight and fit to be seen.  I had only to call for help, and to leave the people to do as they pleased.  The neighbors came in, and then the police.  They knocked, uselessly, at his door.  Then they broke it open, and found him dead in his bed.

“Not the ghost of a suspicion of me entered the mind of any one.  There was no fear of human justice finding me out:  my one unutterable dread was dread of an Avenging Providence.

“I had a short sleep that night, and a dream, in which I did the deed over again.  For a time my mind was busy with thoughts of confessing to the police, and of giving myself up.  If I had not belonged to a respectable family, I should have done it.  From generation to generation there had been no stain on our good name.  It would be death to my father, and disgrace to all my family, if I owned what I had done, and suffered for it on the public scaffold.  I prayed to be guided; and I had a revelation, toward morning, of what to do.

“I was commanded, in a vision, to open the Bible, and vow on it to set my guilty self apart among my innocent fellow-creatures from that day forth; to live among them a separate and silent life, to dedicate the use of my speech to the language of prayer only, offered up in the solitude of my own chamber when no human ear could hear me.  Alone, in the morning, I saw the vision, and vowed the vow.  No human ear has heard me from that time.  No human ear will hear me, to the day of my death.

“Thursday.—­The people came to speak to me, as usual.  They found me dumb.

“What had happened to me in the past, when my head had been hurt, and my speech affected by it, gave a likelier look to my dumbness than it might have borne in the case of another person.  They took me back again to the hospital.  The doctors were divided in opinion.  Some said the shock of what had taken place in the house, coming on the back of the other shock, might, for all they knew, have done the mischief.  And others said, ’She got her speech again after the accident; there has been no new injury since that time; the woman is shamming dumb, for some purpose of her own.’  I let them dispute it as they liked.  All human talk was nothing now to me.  I had set myself apart among my fellow-creatures; I had begun my separate and silent life.

“Through all this time the sense of a coming punishment hanging over me never left my mind.  I had nothing to dread from human justice.  The judgment of an Avenging Providence—­there was what I was waiting for.