d--I am well aware this is horrid. Nobody else, in my place, would
have ended as wickedly as that. All the other women in the world, tried
as I was, would have risen superior to the trial."

9.

"I have said that people (excepting my husband and my relations) were
almost always good to me.

"The landlord of the house which we had taken when we were married heard
of my sad case. He gave me one of his empty houses to look after, and a
little weekly allowance for doing it. Some of the furniture in the upper
rooms, not being wanted by the last tenant, was left to be taken at a
valuation if the next tenant needed it. Two of the servants' bedrooms
(in the attics), one next to the other, had all that was wanted in them.
So I had a roof to cover me, and a choice of beds to lie on, and money
to get me food. All well again--but all too late. If that house could
speak, what tales that house would have to tell of me!

"I had been told by the doctors to exercise my speech. Being all alone,
with nobody to speak to, except when the landlord dropped in, or when
the servant next door said, 'Nice day, ain't it?' or, 'Don't you feel
lonely?' or such like, I bought the newspaper, and read it out loud
to myself to exercise my speech in that way. One day I came upon a bit
about the wives of drunken husbands. It was a report of something said
on that subject by a London coroner, who had held inquests on dead
husbands (in the lower ranks of life), and who had his reasons for
suspecting the wives. Examination of the body (he said) didn't prove it;
and witnesses didn't prove it; but he thought it, nevertheless, quite
possible, in some cases, that, when the woman could bear it no longer,
she sometimes took a damp towel, and waited till the husband (drugged
with his own liquor) was sunk in his sleep, and then put the towel over
his nose and mouth, and ended it that way without any body being the
wiser. I laid down the newspaper; and fell into thinking. My mind was,
by this time, in a prophetic way. I said to myself 'I haven't happened
on this for nothing: this means that I shall see my husband again.'

"It was then just after my dinner-time--two o'clock. That same night,
at the moment when I had put out my candle, and laid me down in bed, I
heard a knock at the street door. Before I had lit my candle I says to
myself, 'Here he is.'

"I huddled on a few things, and struck a light, and went down stairs. I
called out through the door, 'Who's th