d into a passage,
then crept on tiptoe toward the surgery. Arrived there she darted to a
spot she knew, and stretched a trembling hand toward a bottle full of a
dark-colored liquid. As instantly she drew it back, and stood listening
with bated breath and terrified look. It _was_ a footstep approaching
the outer door of the surgery! She turned and fled from it, still
noiseless, and never stopped till she was in her own room. There she
shut and locked the door, fell on her knees by the bedside, and pressed
her face into the coverlid. She had no thought of praying. She wanted to
hide, only to hide. Neither was it from old habit she fell upon her
knees, for she had never been given to kneeling. I can not but think,
nevertheless, that there was a dumb germ of prayer at the heart of the
action--that falling upon her knees, and that hiding of her face. The
same moment something took place within her to which she could have
given no name, which she could have represented in no words, a something
which came she knew not whence, was she knew not what, and went she knew
not whither, of which indeed she would never have become aware except
for what followed, but which yet so wrought, that she rose from her
knees saying to herself, with clenched teeth and burning eyes, "I _will_
tell him."

As if she had known the moment of her death near, she began mechanically
to set every thing in order in the room, and as she came to herself she
was saying, "Let him kill me. I wish he would. I am quite willing to
die by his hand. He will be kind, and do it gently. He knows so many
ways!"

It was a terrible day. She did not go out of her room again. Her mood
changed a hundred times. The resolve to confess alternated with wild
mockery and laughter, but still returned. She would struggle to persuade
herself that her whole condition was one of foolish exaggeration, of
senseless excitement about nothing--the merest delirium of feminine
fastidiousness; and the next instant would turn cold with horror at a
fresh glimpse of the mere fact. What could the wretched matter be to him
now--or to her? Who was the worse, or had ever been the worse but
herself? And what did it amount to? What claim had any one, what claim
could even a God, if such a being there were, have upon the past which
had gone from her, was no more in any possible sense within her reach
than if it had never been? Was it not as if it had never been? Was the
woman to be hurled--to hurl he