er own views of life
and death. Linda, as she thought of it in her own chamber, with her
eyes wide open, looking into the dark night from out of her window,
declared to herself that in certain circumstances she would certainly
attempt to kill him. She shuddered and shook till she almost fell
from her chair. Come what might, she would not endure the pressure of
his caress.

Then she got up and resolved that she would even yet make one other
struggle to escape. It would not be true of her to say that at this
moment she was mad, but the mixed excitement and terror of her
position as she was waiting her doom, joined to her fears, her
doubts, and, worse than all, her certainties as to her condition in
the sight of God, had almost unstrung her mind. She had almost come
to believe that the world was at its end, and that the punishment of
which she had heard so much was already upon her. "If this is to be a
doom for ever," she said to herself, "the God I have striven to love
is very cruel." But then there came an exercise of reason which told
her that it could not be a doom for ever. It was clear to her that
there was much as yet within her own power which could certainly not
be so in that abode of the unblessed to which she was to be summoned.
There was the window before her, with the silent river running below;
and she knew that she could throw herself from it if she chose to put
forth the power which she still possessed. She felt that "she herself
might her quietus make with a bare bodkin." Why should she

"Fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after life,
The undiscovered country from whose bourne
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of."

Linda knew nothing of Hamlet, but the thought was there, exact; and
the knowledge that some sort of choice was still open to her, if it
were only the choice of sending herself at once to a world different
from this, a world in which Peter Steinmarc would not be the avenger
of her life's wickedness, made her aware that even yet something
might be done.

On the following morning she was in the kitchen, as was usual with
her now, at an early hour, and made the coffee for her aunt's
breakfast, and for Peter's. Tetchen was there also, and to Tetchen
she spoke a word or two in good humour. Tetchen said afterward