intensely exasperating
woman as well. I am no coward; I think I may say the reverse; but I
would rather be alone with a tigress than with such a woman as she would
have been, if roused to jealous fury. She would not have stirred, she
would not have raised her voice, but she would have spoken words that
would have stung like asps and cut like Damascus blades. No devil would
have shown in that kind of torment greater ingenuity. I am a
self-controlled man, yet I can imagine Helen Lorrington driving me, if
she had tried, into such a state of frenzy that I should hardly know
what I was doing. In such a case I should end, I think, by crushing her
in my arms, and fairly strangling the low voice that taunted me. But--I
could never have stabbed her in her sleep!"

Again he paused, and again Anne kept silence. But he did not notice it;
he was absorbed in his own train of thought.

"It is a relief to speak of this to you," he continued, "for you knew
Helen, and Heathcote also. Do you know I can imagine just how she worked
upon him; how that fair face and those narrow eyes of hers wrought their
deadly darts. Her very want of strength was an accessory; for if she
could have risen and struck him, if she had been _capable_ of any such
strong action, the exasperation would have been less. But that a
creature so helpless, one whose slight form he had been used to carry
about the house in his arms, one who could not walk far unaided--that
such a creature should lie there, in all her delicate beauty, and with
barbed words deliberately torment him--Anne, I can imagine a rush of
madness which might well end in murder and death. But not a plot. If he
had killed her in a passion, and then boldly avowed the deed, giving
himself up, I should have had some sympathy with him, in spite of the
horror of the deed. But to arrange the method of his crime (as he
evidently tried to do) so that he would not be discovered, but be
enabled quietly to inherit her money--bah! I almost wish I were the
hangman myself! Out on the border he would have been lynched long ago."

His listener still remained mute, but a little fold of flesh inside her
lips was bitten through by her clinched teeth in the effort she made to
preserve that muteness.

It seemed to have been a relief to Dexter to let out those strong words.
He paused, turned toward Anne, and for the first time noted her dress.
"Are you in mourning?" he asked, doubtfully, looking at the unbroken
black of