aid, "I have brought you something to make you
sleep."

He had placed the glass to her lips, when a movement in the next room
made him start and lift his eyes. In another moment his wife's hands
were on his arm, and her eyes were blazing into his own. The liquor in
the glass was spilt upon the bed. Hugo turned deadly pale.

"What do you mean? What do you want?" he said, with a look of mingled
rage and terror. "What are you doing here?"

"I have come to save her--from you." She was not afraid, now that the
words were said, now that she had seen the guilty look upon his face.
She confronted him steadily; she placed herself between him and the bed.
Hugo uttered a low but emphatic malediction on her "meddlesome folly."

"Why are you not in your room?" he said. "I locked you in."

"I was not there. Thank God that I was not."

"And why should you thank God?" said Hugo, who stood looking at her with
an ugly expression of baffled cunning on his face. "I was doing no harm.
I was giving her a sleeping-draught."

"Would she ever have waked?" asked Kitty, in a whisper.

She looked into her husband's eyes as she spoke, and she knew from that
moment that the accusation was based on no idle fancy of her own. In
heart, at least, he was a murderer.

But the question called forth his worst passions. He cursed her
again--bitterly, blasphemously--then raised his hand and struck her with
his closed fist between the eyes. He knew what he was doing: she fell to
the ground, stunned and bleeding. He thrust her out of his way; she lay
on the floor between the bed and the window, moaning a little, but for a
time utterly unconscious of all that went on around her.

Hugo's preparations had been spoilt. He was obliged to begin them over
again. But this time his nerve was shaken: he blundered a little once or
twice. Kitty's low moan was in his ears: the paralysed woman upon the
bed was regarding him with a look of frozen horror in her wide-open
eyes. She could not move: she could not speak, but she could understand.

He turned his back upon the two, and measured out the drops once more
into the glass. His hand shook as he did so. He was longer about his
work than he had been before. So long that Kitty came to herself a
little, and watched him with a horrible fascination. First the drops:
then the water; then the sleeping-draught, from which the sleeper was
not to awake, would be ready.

Kitty did not know how she found strength or courag