“They may be as innocent as I am.  And they may be murderers in their hearts.  I can prove nothing, I can prevent nothing.  Oh! do come home.”

There was but one thought which remained clear in her mind.  She must keep herself safe—­she must keep herself safe.  In the anguish of her trouble she confessed, by putting it into words, a thing which she had not confessed before, and even as she spoke she did not realise that her words contained confession.

“If I were to die now,” she said with a touching gravity, “he would care very much.”

A few moments later she said, “It does not matter what happens to me, how ridiculous or vulgar or foolish I seem, if I can keep myself safe—­until after.  I will write to him now and ask him to try to come back.”

It was the letter she wrote after this decision which Osborn saw among others awaiting postal, and which he stopped to examine.

Chapter Eighteen

Hester sat at the open window of her boudoir in the dark.  She had herself put out the wax candles, because she wanted to feel herself surrounded by the soft blackness.  She had sat through the dinner and heard her husband’s anxious inquiries about the rotten handrail, and had watched his disturbed face and Emily’s pale one.  She herself had said but little, and had been glad when the time came that she could decently excuse herself and come away.

As she sat in the darkness and felt the night breath of the flowers in the garden, she was thinking of all the murderers she had ever heard of.  She was reflecting that some of them had been quite respectable people, and that all of them must have lived through a period in which they gradually changed from respectable people to persons in whose brains a thought had worked which once they would have believed impossible to them, which they might have scouted the idea of their giving room to.  She was sure the change must come about slowly.  At first it would seem too mad and ridiculous, a sort of angry joke.  Then the angry joke would return again and again, until at last they let it stay and did not laugh at it, but thought it over.  Such things always happened because some one wanted, or did not want, something very much, something it drove them mad to think of being forced to live without, or with.  Men who hated a woman and could not rid themselves of her, who hated the sight of her face, her eyes, her hair, the sound of her voice and step, and were rendered insane by her nearness and the thought that they never could be free from any of these things, had before now, commonplace or comparatively agreeable men, by degrees reached the point where a knife or a shot or a heavy blow seemed not only possible but inevitable.  People who had been ill-treated, people who had faced horrors through want and desire, had reached the moment in which they took by force what Fate would not grant them.  Her brain so whirled that she wondered if she was not a little delirious as she sat in the stillness thinking such strange things.