by another. I
believed I should begin to prepare the way.

"Suppose she should die," I said to my wife.

"Then grief would kill me, too," she said.

I could not stand the look on her face.

"This is the only happiness I ever had," she said, pressing the little
body close to her.

I believed then that I could never do what I had planned. I knew I could
never take Mary's happiness away. I felt myself caught like a rat in a
trap. The blood of my fathers was going on in a new house of flesh and
bone! I had done the great crime! And there was no help for it!

We move, however, like puppets of the show. Just see!

Within a month the doctor at the clinic had said that my wife was
incurable with consumption.

"The worst trouble with it all," said he, "is that she will suffer
without hope and for no purpose."

"Death would be good luck?" said I.

"The kindest thing of all," he answered, killing a fly on the window
ledge, as if to demonstrate it.

I was trembling all over with wild nerves, a wild brain-madness. I shut
my eyes craftily as I went down the steps.

"She may go first," I whispered to myself. "I will kill her in the name
of God. And then the other and the Devil is cheated!"

Was I a madman? I cannot say! I had sense enough to prepare myself by
days of drinking, during which I deliberately and cruelly beat whatever
tenderness remained in me into insensibility. I suffered no doubts,
however, for I was sure that I had planned a crime which, unlike all my
others, was founded on unselfishness. I believed I had dedicated myself
at last to a supreme test of goodness and love.

The question of what would become of me after I had done this terrible
thing never entered my mind. My desire was to place Mary where she need
suffer no more, where she would be free from hardships and labors, from
lingering disease and slow death, and from my ungoverned brutalities.
Above all, however, I wanted to accomplish the second murder--made
possible to me by the first. A monomania possessed me. I wanted to put
an end forever to my strain of blood before it was too late--before it
had escaped me through the body of my little daughter.

My zeal, I suppose, was like that of a religious fanatic; but it did not
blind me to the horror of my undertaking. I cried out aloud at the
picture of the sad, reproachful eyes of my poor wife, fixed upon me as
they might be when the film of death passed over them. I knew that I
must do the thi