r!"

"Decided her? Do you mean she has murdered her child?" I demanded,
trembling at my own words.

"She sacrificed him; she determined to do nothing to make him live. Why
else did she lock herself up, why else did she turn away the doctor? The
book gave her a horror; she determined to rescue him,--to prevent him
from ever being touched. He had a crisis at two o'clock in the morning.
I know that from the nurse, who had left her then, but whom, for a short
time, she called back. Dolcino got much worse, but she insisted on the
nurse's going back to bed, and after that she was alone with him for
hours."

"Do you pretend that she has no pity, that she's insane?"

"She held him in her arms, she pressed him to her breast, not to see
him; but she gave him no remedies; she did nothing the doctor ordered.
Everything is there, untouched. She has had the honesty not even to
throw the drugs away!"

I dropped upon the nearest bench, overcome with wonder and agitation,
quite as much at Miss Armbient's terrible lucidity as at the charge she
made against her sister-in-law. There was an amazing coherency in her
story, and it was dreadful to me to see myself figuring in it as so
proximate a cause.

"You are a very strange woman, and you say strange things."

"You think it necessary to protest, but you are quite ready to believe
me. You have received an impression of my sister-in-law, you have
guessed of what she is capable."

I do not feel bound to say what concession, on this point, I made to
Miss Ambient, who went on to relate to me that within the last half-hour
Beatrice had had a revulsion; that she was tremendously frightened at
what she had done; that her fright itself betrayed her; and that she
would now give heaven and earth to save the child. "Let us hope she
will!" I said, looking at my watch and trying to time poor Ambient;
whereupon my companion repeated, in a singular tone, "Let us hope so!"
When I asked her if she herself could do nothing, and whether she ought
not to be with her sister-in-law, she replied, "You had better go and
judge; she is like a wounded tigress!"

I never saw Mrs. Ambient till six months after this, and therefore
cannot pretend to have verified the comparison. At the latter period she
was again the type of the lady. "She'll treat him better after this," I
remember Miss Ambient saying, in response to some quick outburst (on my
part) of compassion for her brother. Although I had been in the ho