, making vehement
gestures in her desperation, but now a sudden, terrible, yet calming
idea struck her to absolute quietness. There was a way, just one, to
thwart this adversary; she could destroy the body into which it thought
to return. At the same moment there arose in her soul two opposing waves
of emotion--one of passionate self-pity to think that she, so weak and
timid, should be driven to destroy herself; the other of triumph over
her mortal foe delivered into her hands. She felt a kind of triumph too
in the instantaneousness with which she was able to make up her mind
that this was the only thing to be done--she, usually so full of mental
and moral hesitation. Let it be done quickly--now, while the spur of
excitement pricked her on. The Thing seemed to have a knowledge of her
experiences which was not reciprocal. How it would laugh if it
recollected in its uncanny way, that she had wanted to kill herself and
it with her, that she had had it at her mercy and then had been too weak
and cowardly to strike! Should she buy some poison when she reached
Paddington? She knew nothing about poisons and their effects, except
that carbolic caused terrible agony, and laudanum was not to be trusted
unless you knew the dose. The train was slowing up and the lonely river
gleamed silverly below. It beckoned to her, the river, upon whose stream
she had spent so many young, happy days.

She got out at the little station and walked away from it with a quick,
light step, as though hastening to keep some pleasurable appointment.
After all the years of weak, bewildered subjection, of defeat and
humiliation, her turn had come; she had found the answer to the Sphinx's
riddle, the way to victory.

She knew the place where she found herself, for she had several times
made one of a party rowing down from Oxford to London. But it was not
one of the frequented parts of the river, being a quiet reach among
solitary meadows. She remembered that there was a shabby little house
standing by itself on the bank where boats could be hired, for they had
put in there once to replace an oar, having lost one down a weir in the
neighborhood. The weir had not been on the main stream, but they had
come upon it in exploring a backwater. It could not be far off.

She walked quickly along the bank, turning over and over in her mind the
same thoughts; the cruel wrong which now for so many years she had
suffered, the final disgrace brought upon her and her hu