I found myself calling to mind the caution my husband had given me
while we were at this part of the work, word for word as he had spoken
it. _'Take care you don't find your hands in the next room.'_ That
was what he had said down in the parlor. Up in his bedroom I kept on
repeating it in my own mind--with my eyes all the while on the key,
which he had moved to the inner side of the door to lock himself
in--till the knowledge of what it meant burst on me like a flash of
light. I looked at the wall, at the bedhead, at my own two hands--and I
shivered as if it was winter time.

"Hours must have passed like minutes while I was up stairs that night.
I lost all count of time. When my husband came up from his drinking, he
found me in his room."

10.

"I leave the rest untold, and pass on purposely to the next morning.

"No mortal eyes but mine will ever see these lines. Still, there are
things a woman can't write of even to herself. I shall only say this.
I suffered the last and worst of many indignities at my husband's
hands--at the very time when I first saw, set plainly before me, the
way to take his life. He went out toward noon next day, to go his rounds
among the public houses; my mind being then strung up to deliver myself
from him, for good and all, when he came back at night.

"The things we had used on the previous day were left in the parlor. I
was all by myself in the house, free to put in practice the lesson he
had taught me. I proved myself an apt scholar. Before the lamps were lit
in the street I had my own way prepared (in my bedroom and in his)
for laying my own hands on him--after he had locked himself up for the
night.

"I don't remember feeling either fear or doubt through all those hours.
I sat down to my bit of supper with no better and no worse an appetite
than usual. The only change in me that I can call to mind was that I
felt a singular longing to have somebody with me to keep me company.
Having no friend to ask in, I went to the street door and stood looking
at the people passing this way and that.

"A stray dog, sniffing about, came up to me. Generally I dislike dogs
and beasts of all kinds. I called this one in and gave him his supper.
He had been taught (I suppose) to sit up on his hind-legs and beg for
food; at any rate, that was his way of asking me for more. I laughed--it
seems impossible when I look back at it now, but for all that it's
true--I laughed till the tears ran down my cheek