e best of my ability. Whatever he said, and whatever
he did, I knew he was going as straight as man could go to his own death
by my hands.

"The rats and mice were all over the house, and the place generally was
out of repair. He ought to have begun on the kitchen-floor; but (having
sentence pronounced against him) he began in the empty parlors on the
ground-floor.

"These parlors were separated by what is called a 'lath-and-plaster
wall.' The rats had damaged it. At one part they had gnawed through
and spoiled the paper, at another part they had not got so far. The
landlord's orders were to spare the paper, because he had some by him to
match it. My husband began at a place where the paper was whole. Under
his directions I mixed up--I won't say what. With the help of it he got
the paper loose from the wall, without injuring it in any way, in a long
hanging strip. Under it was the plaster and the laths, gnawed away in
places by the rats. Though strictly a paperhanger by trade, he could be
plasterer too when he liked. I saw how he cut away the rotten laths and
ripped off the plaster; and (under his directions again) I mixed up the
new plaster he wanted, and handed him the new laths, and saw how he set
them. I won't say a word about how this was done either.

"I have a reason for keeping silence here, which is, to my mind, a very
dreadful one. In every thing that my husband made me do that day he was
showing me (blindfold) the way to kill him, so that no living soul, in
the police or out of it, could suspect me of the deed.

"We finished the job on the wall just before dark. I went to my cup of
tea, and he went to his bottle of gin.

"I left him, drinking hard, to put our two bedrooms tidy for the night.
The place that his bed happened to be set in (which I had never remarked
particularly before) seemed, in a manner of speaking, to force itself on
my notice now.

"The head of the bedstead was set against the wall which divided his
room from mine. From looking at the bedstead I got to looking at the
wall next. Then to wondering what it was made of. Then to rapping
against it with my knuckles. The sound told me there was nothing but
lath and plaster under the paper. It was the same as the wall we had
been at work on down stairs. We had cleared our way so far through this
last--in certain places where the repairs were most needed--that we had
to be careful not to burst through the paper in the room on the other
side.