“Oh, those days and nights!  And oh, the face of the mother when the doctors told her that the case was hopeless!  I asked myself then, and I have asked myself a hundred times since, which of all the emotions I saw pictured there bit the deepest, and made the most lasting impression on her guilty heart?  Was it remorse?  If so, she showed no change in her attitude towards Helena, unless it was by an added bitterness.  The sweet looks and gentle ways of Frank’s young daughter could not win against a hate sharpened by disappointment.  Useless for me to hope for it.  Release from the remorse of years was not to come in that way.  As I realized this, I grew desperate and resorted again to the old trick of stopping the clock at the fatal hour.  This time her guilty heart responded.  She acknowledged the stab and let all her miseries appear.  But how?  In a way to wring my heart almost to madness, and not benefit the child at all.  She had her first stroke that night.  I had made her a helpless invalid.

“That was eight years ago, and since then what?  Stagnation.  She lived with her memories, and I with mine.  Helena only had a right to hope, and hope perhaps she did, till—­Is that the great clock talking?  Listen!  They all talk, but I heed only the one.  What does it say?  Tell! tell! tell!  Does it think I will be silent now when I come to my own guilt?  That I will seek to hide my weakness when I could not hide her sin?”

“Explain!” It was Violet speaking, and her tone was stern in its command.  “Of what guilt do you speak?  Not of guilt towards Helena; you pitied her too much—­”

“But I pitied my dear madam more.  It was that which affected me and drew me into crime against my will.  Besides, I did not know—­ not at first—­what was in the little bowl of curds and cream I carried to the girl each day.  She had eaten them in her step-mother’s room, and under her step-mother’s eye as long as she had strength to pass from room to room, and how was I to guess that it was not wholesome?  Because she failed in health from day to day?  Was not my dear madam failing in health also; and was there poison in her cup?  Innocent at that time, why am I not innocent now?  Because—­Oh, I will tell it all; as though at the bar of God.  I will tell all the secrets of that day.

“She was sitting with her hand trembling on the tray from which I had just lifted the bowl she had bid me carry to Helena.  I had seen her so a hundred times before, but not with just that look in her eyes, or just that air of desolation in her stony figure.  Something made me speak; something made me ask if she were not quite so well as usual, and something made her reply with the dreadful truth that the doctor had given her just two months more to live.  My fright and mad anguish stupefied me; for I was not prepared for this, no, not at all;—­and unconsciously I stared down at the bowl I held, unable to breathe or move or even to meet her look.”