heart watched her as she bent over the dying
man and gazed into his wide-open eyes, already sightless and staring.
Calculation was in her look and calculation only; and calculation, or
something equally unintelligible, sent her next glance in the
direction of his brother. What was in her mind? I could understand
her indifference to Frank even at the crisis of his fate, but not the
interest she showed in Andrew. It was an absorbing one, altering her
whole expression. I no longer knew her for my dear young madam, and the
jealousy I had never felt towards Frank rose to frantic resentment in my
breast as I beheld what very likely might be a tardy recognition of the
other's well-known passion, forced into disclosure by the exigencies of
the moment.

"Alarmed by the strength of my feelings, and fearing an equal disclosure
on my own part, I sought for a refuge from all eyes and found it in a
little balcony opening out at my right. On to this balcony I stepped
and found myself face to face with a star-lit heaven. Had I only been
content with my isolation and the splendour of the spectacle spread out
before me! But no, I must look back upon that bed and the solitary woman
standing beside it! I must watch the settling of her body into rigidity
as a voice rose from beside the other Postlethwaite saying, 'It is a
matter of minutes now,' and then--and then--the slow creeping of her
hand to her husband's mouth, the outspreading of her palm across the
livid lips--its steady clinging there, smothering the feeble gasps of
one already moribund, till the quivering form grew still, and Frank
Postlethwaite lay dead before my eyes!

"I saw, and made no outcry, but she did, bringing the doctor back to her
side with the startled exclamation:

"'Dead? I thought he had an hour's life left in him, and he has passed
before his brother.'

"I thought it hate--the murderous impulse of a woman who sees her
enemy at her mercy and can no longer restrain the passion of her
long-cherished antagonism; and while something within me rebelled at the
act, I could not betray her, though silence made a murderer of me too.
I could not. Her spell was upon me as in another instant it was upon
everyone else in the room. No suspicion of one so self-repressed in
her sadness disturbed the universal sympathy; and encouraged by this
blindness of the crowd, I vowed within myself never to reveal her
secret. The man was dead, or as good as dead, when she touched him; a