urst forth then. "And I! Can you ever picture to yourself
the magnitude of my need of you?"

He clenched the hands in his coat-pockets, and turned his back on her,
and she saw his shoulders heave.

"It is killing me," he said--"killing me--just that."

His voice, which had been raised, sank brokenly. She listened, when it
was silent, to the beating of her heart.

In a minute she went to him and laid a hand upon his arm.

"Then, why?" she asked him, whisperingly. "Why?"

He flung round upon her, and she fell back from the vehement accusing
of his eyes.

"Why?" he repeated. "Why?" He threw a hand at the empty sofa. "There!"
he said. "There--where you ask me to turn my back--my dead wife lies
there--always for me. And she is between you and me for ever."

It sounded to her but the utterance of morbidity. The strange words
were only a token of that from which she had come to save him. She had
the courage to be unmaidenly, to persist.

"I, at any rate, do not see it so," she said. "To have me for your
friend is to do no wrong to your dead wife."

"How can we be friends--you and I?" he asked her; and she, who knew
they could not now be merely that, did not speak.

"I, who for your sake cursed her in my heart," he went on, his shaken
voice hushed to an awe-struck whisper. "You, who put into her hands the
poison which killed her."

"I?" she breathed, and drew back, staring at him, wondering, for one
dreadful moment, had his unhealthy brooding turned his brain. "Killed
her? I?"

"You!" he said, wildly. He went across the room, and shut the door
behind her they had left ajar. "If it had been I myself I could have
borne it; but you--_you_--! I found the empty bottle, that night,
dropped from her hand; the label--'Poison'--and your name----"

"The chloral bottle?" she asked him; and the cloud of fear and dismay
lifted from her eyes, and they were alight with understanding and with
hope. She went swiftly to him and caught his arm. "Horace, do you
remember that you warned me never to give her any narcotic, however
earnestly she might beg for it--that it would not be safe--that she
would kill herself? Do you remember?"

"But you gave it, all the same. Your name was on the bottle----"

"On the bottle--of water," she said. "It never held anything else. I
used to take it home and fill it every day. The doctor told me to do
it--it was a harmless fraud we played on her. She used to drink it,
never doubting, and fall asl