e whole current of her thoughts. Mrs. Wragge's last
question, trifling as it was, had checked her on the verge of the
precipice--had roused the old vain hope in her once more of release by
accident.

"Why not?" she said. "Why may something not have happened to one of
them?"

She placed the laudanum in the cupboard, locked it, and put the key in
her packet. "Time enough still," she thought, "before Monday. I'll wait
till the captain comes back."

After some consultation downstairs, it was agreed that the servant
should sit up that night, in expectation of her master's return. The day
passed quietly, without events of any kind. Magdalen dreamed away the
hours over a book. A weary patience of expectation was all she felt
now--the poignant torment of thought was dulled and blunted at last.
She passed the day and the evening in the parlor, vaguely conscious of a
strange feeling of aversion to going back to her own room. As the night
advanced, as the noises ceased indoors and out, her restlessness began
to return. She endeavored to quiet herself by reading. Books failed to
fix her attention. The newspaper was lying in a corner of the room: she
tried the newspaper next.

She looked mechanically at the headings of the articles; she listlessly
turned over page after page, until her wandering attention was arrested
by the narrative of an Execution in a distant part of England. There was
nothing to strike her in the story of the crime, and yet she read it. It
was a common, horribly common, act of bloodshed--the murder of a woman
in farm-service by a man in the same employment who was jealous of her.
He had been convicted on no extraordinary evidence, he had been hanged
under no unusual circumstances. He had made his confession, when he knew
there was no hope for him, like other criminals of his class, and the
newspaper had printed it at the end of the article, in these terms:

"I kept company with the deceased for a year or thereabouts. I said I
would marry her when I had money enough. She said I had money enough
now. We had a quarrel. She refused to walk out with me any more; she
wouldn't draw me my beer; she took up with my fellow-servant, David
Crouch. I went to her on the Saturday, and said I would marry her as
soon as we could be asked in church if she would give up Crouch. She
laughed at me. She turned me out of the wash-house, and the rest of them
saw her turn me out. I was not easy in my mind. I went and sat on the
g