When she first took her place in the house at Twickenham as a resident, Trevelyan did not take much notice of her but, after awhile, he would say a few words to her, especially when it might chance that she was with him in her sister’s absence.  He would speak of dear Emily, and poor Emily, and shake his head slowly, and talk of the pity of it.  ’The pity of it, Iago; oh, the pity of it,’ he said once.  The allusion to her was so terrible that she almost burst out in anger, as she would have done formerly.  She almost told him that he had been as wrong throughout as was the jealous husband in the play whose words he quoted, and that his jealousy, if continued, was likely to be as tragical.  But she restrained herself, and kept close to her needle, making, let us hope, an auspicious garment for Hugh Stanbury.  ’She has seen it now,’ he continued; ‘she has seen it now.’  Still she went on with her hemming in silence.  It certainly could not be her duty to upset at a word all that her sister had achieved.  ’You know that she has confessed?’ he asked.

‘Pray, pray do not talk about it, Louis.’

‘I think you ought to know,’ he said.  Then she rose from her seat and left the room.  She could not stand it, even though he were mad, even though he were dying!

She went to her sister and repeated what had been said.  ’You had better not notice it,’ said Emily.  ’It is only a proof of what I told you.  There are times in which his mind is as active as ever it was, but it is active in so terrible a direction!’

’I cannot sit and hear it.  And what am I to say when he asks me a question as he did just now?  He said that you had confessed.’

’So I have.  Do none confess but the guilty?  What is all that we have read about the Inquisition and the old tortures?  I have had to learn that torturing has not gone out of the world, that is all.’

‘I must go away if he says the same thing to me so again.’

’That is nonsense, Nora.  If I can bear it, cannot you?  Would you have me drive him into violence again by disputing with him on such a subject?’

‘But he may recover and then he will remember what you have said.’

’If he recovers altogether he will suspect nothing.  I must take my chance of that.  You cannot suppose that I have not thought about it.  I have often sworn to myself that though the world should fall around me, nothing should make me acknowledge that I had ever been untrue to my duty as a married woman, either in deed, or word, or thought.  I have no doubt that the poor wretches who were tortured in their cells used to make the same resolutions as to their confessions.  But yet, when their nails were dragged out of them, they would own to anything.  My nails have been dragged out, and I have been willing to confess anything.  When he talks of the pity of it, of course I know what he means.  There has been something, some remainder of a feeling, which has still kept him from asking me that question.  May God, in his mercy, continue to him that feeling!’