I suppose that it is given to few men to hear their death plotted in their presence. But I had come to the pass by this time where it struck me as an impersonal thing. I listened; but somehow the full sense of what she said, as affecting me, did not then impinge upon my brain with waking force. I stood as if in a trance; I stood and looked on at those two contending personalities, that were concerned just now with the question of my life or death, as if I were a spectator in a theater--as if it were someone else of whom they spoke. “Go,” she cried to Charles again, “and I will give him up.” “Katherine,” he said, “and you would do this thing?” “Why?” she retorted, “what is this man's life beside mine? His soul is dead! I tell you, Charles, that I have come through Hell alive to gain one ray of happiness! But go!--and leave the rest to me.” And she grasped the bell cord and pulled it. Pulled it again and again. The sound wandered crazily through what remote corridors I know not. She made a step towards him. He leaped to his feet with an oath, with loathing in his eyes, shrank back from her, and held out a hand as if to ward off some unclean thing. Bewilderment lined her face. She groped to understand. And then, as the full significance of his gesture came home to her, she winced and swayed as if from a blow; and the pistol dropped from her loosened grasp to the floor. “You--you abandon me?” she said slowly. “You desert me, then? Love, Love, think how I have loved you that I did this thing! And is what I have suffered--what I have done--still to purchase--nothing?” She pleaded for my death; but I hope that I shall never again see on any human face the look of despair that was on hers. I pitied her! Heavy feet on the stairway woke me from my trance. Unregarded of them both I grasped my pistol from the floor and sprang for the window. A door opened somewhere above, and a voice asked: “You rang, Ma'am?” From without the window I looked back into the room. She stood with outstretched hands--hands that reached upward from the pit of torment, my fancy told me--and pleaded for a little love. “In all this world is there no little ray of love for me?”--it was so my imagination rather than my hearing translated the slight movement of her lips. And while she and the man called Charles stood thus at gaze with one another, the servant spoke again from the stairway. “You rang?” he asked. She slowly straightened. She steadied herself. And with her eyes still fixed upon those of Charles she cried: “Yes, yes, I rang, Jones! Your master is--dead. Your master's murdered! And there, there,” and she stabbed an accusing finger at her erstwhile lover, “there is the man who murdered him!” And then I turned from the window and ran from that house; and as I ran I saw the Dawn, like a wild, fair woman, walk up the eastern sky with blood-stained feet. XIII.--Words and Thoughts [A Play in One Act] Characters: Cousin Fanny Hemlock John Speaker