of her otherwise?"

The sudden change in Mrs. Simcoe's expression conveyed her thought to him
before her words:

"No, no! not of _her_, but--"

She stopped, as if wrestling with a fierce inward agony. The veins on her
forehead were swollen, and her eyes flashed with singular light. It was
not clear whether she were trying to say something to conceal something,
or simply to recover her self-command. It was a terrible spectacle, and
Lawrence Newt felt as if he must veil his eyes, as if he had no right to
look upon this great agony of another.

"But--" said he, mechanically, as if by repeating her last word to help
her in her struggle.

The sad, severe woman stood before him in the darkening twilight, erect,
and more than erect, drawn back from him, and quivering and defiant. She
was silent for an instant; then, leaning forward and reaching toward him,
she took the miniature from Lawrence Newt, closed her hand over it
convulsively, and gasped in a tone that sounded like a low, wailing cry:

"But of _him_."

Lawrence Newt raised his eyes from the vehement woman to the portrait
that hung above her.

In the twilight that lost loveliness glimmered down into his very
heart with appealing pathos. Perhaps those parted lips in their red
bloom had spoken to him--lips so long ago dust! Perhaps those eyes, in
the days forever gone--gone with hopes and dreams, and the soft lustre
of youth--had looked into his own, had answered his fond yearning with
equal fondness. By all that passionate remembrance, by a lost love, by
the early dead, he felt himself conjured to speak, nor suffer his silence
even to seem to shield a crime.

"And why not of him?" he began, calmly, and with profound melancholy
rather than anger. "Why not of him, who did not hesitate to marry
the woman whom he knew loved another, and whom the difference of years
should rather have made his daughter than his wife? Why not of him, who
brutally confessed, when she was his wife, an earlier and truer love of
his own, and so murdered her slowly, slowly--not with blows of the hand,
oh no!--not with poison in her food, oh no!" cried Lawrence Newt, warming
into bitter vehemence, clenching his hand and shaking it in the air, "but
who struck her blows on the heart--who stabbed her with sharp icicles of
indifference--who poisoned her soul with the tauntings of his mean
suspicions--mean and false--and the meaner because he knew them to be
false? Why not of him, who--"

"