make me his without losing the benefit of an
alliance with Miss Dudleigh. And I thought I
saw also, and entered into his plans, though
they comprised crime and entailed horrors upon
me from which woman naturally shrinks. I was
hard as the nether millstone of which the Bible
speaks, and went determinedly on in the path of
dissimulation and crime which had been marked
out for me, till we came to this inn. Then,
owing, perhaps, to my long imprisonment in the
dreadful box, I began to feel qualms of
physical fear and such harrowing mental
forebodings that more than once during that
terrible evening I came near shouting for
release.

But I was held back by apprehensions as great
as any from which a premature release from my
place of hiding could have freed me. I dared
not face Honora, and I dared not subject Edwin
Urquhart to the consequences of a public
recognition of our perfidy, and so I let my
opportunity go by, and became the sharer, as I
was already the instigator, of the unheard-of
crime by which I became, in the eyes of the
world, his wife.

What I suffered during its perpetration no word
of mine can convey. I cringed to her moans; I
shook under the blow that stifled them. And
when all was over, and the bolts which confined
me were shot back, and I found myself once more
on my feet and in the free air of this most
horrible of rooms, I looked about, not for him,
but her, and when I did not see her or any
token of her death, I was seized by such an
agony of revulsion that I uttered a great and
irrepressible cry which filled the house, and
brought more than one startled inquirer to our
door.

For retribution and remorse were already busy
within me, and in the lurking shadows about the
fireplace I thought I saw the long and narrow
slit made by the half-closed panel standing
open between me and the secret place of her
entombment. And though it was but an optical
delusion, the panel being really closed, it
might as well have been the truth, for I have
never been able to rid myself of the sight of
that chimerical strip of darkness, with