"Oh, I stand between you?"

"Yes you and my duty."

"Much you value either."

"I know my duty and will do it. Iver Verstage and I can never
belong to each other. We know it, and we have parted forever. I
have not desired to be untrue to you in heart; but I did not know
what was possible and what impossible in this poor, unhappy heart
of mine when I promised to love you. I did not know what love
meant at the time. Mother told me it grew as a matter of course
in married life, like chickweed in a garden."

"Am I gone crazed, or have you?" exclaimed Bideabout, snorting
with passion. "You have parted with Iver quite so but only till
after my death, which you will compass between you. I know that
well enough. It was because I knew that, that I would not suffer
you to give me doses of laudanum. A couple of drops, where one
would suffice, and this obstruction to your loves was removed."

"No, never!" exclaimed Mehetabel, with flashing eye.

"You women are like the glassy pools in the Moor. There is a smooth
face, and fair flowers floating thereon, and underneath the toad
and the effect, the water-rat and festering poison. I shall know
how to drive out of you the devil that possesses you this spirit
of rebellion and passion for Iver Verstage."

"You may do that," said Mehetabel, recovering her self-mastery, "if
you will be kind, forbearing, and gentle."

"It is not with kindness and gentleness that I shall do it,"
scoffed the Broom-Squire. "The woman that will not bend must be
broken. It is not I who will have to yield in this house I, who
have been master here these twenty years. I shall know how to bring
you to your senses."

He was in foaming fury. He shook his fist, and his short hair
bristled.

Mehetabel shrank from him as from a maniac.

"You have no need to threaten," she said, with sadness in her tone.
"I am prepared for anything. Life is not so precious to me that I
care for it."

"Then why did you crawl out of the marsh?"

She looked at him with wide-open eyes.

"Make an end of my wretchedness if you will. Take a knife, and
drive it into my heart. Go to your closet, and bring me that poison
you have there, and pour it between my lips. Thrust me, if you
will, into the Marsh. It is all one to me. I cannot love you unless
you change your manners of thought and act and speech altogether."

"Bah!" sneered he, "I shall not kill you. But I shall make you
understand to fear me, if you cannot love me." H