I entered the house with difficulty. I was as feeble as if I had been under the hands of the physician for weeks. A light was burning on the staircase. I took it and went into the parlor, which I narrowly examined. There were no remaining proofs of the late disorder. The table was set against the wall. The chess-men were all gathered up, and neatly put away in the box, which stood upon the mantel. “There is proof of coolness and deliberation here!” I muttered to myself, as I took my way up-stairs. When I entered my chamber, I felt a pang, the fore-runner of a spasm. I had been for several years afflicted with these spasms, in great or small degree. They marked every singular mental excitement under which I labored. It was no doubt one of these spasms which had seized and overpowered me while I sat within the tree. Never before had I suffered from one so severe; but the violence of this was naturally due to the extreme of agony--as sudden as it was terrible--which seized upon my soul. My physician had provided me with a remedy against these attacks to which I was accustomed to resort. This, though a potent remedy, was also a potent poison. It was a medicine called the hydrocyanic or prussic acid. Five minims was a dose, but two drops were death. I went to the medicine-case which stood beneath the head of the bed, with the view to getting out the vial; but my wife started up eagerly as I approached, and with trembling accents, demanded what was the matter. She saw me covered with mud and soaking with water. I told her that I had got wet coming homeward and had slipped down the hill. “Why did you stay so late--why not come home sooner, dear husband?” “Hypocrite!” I muttered while stooping down for the chest. “You are sick--you have your spasms!” she now said, rising from the bed and offering to measure the medicine. This she had repeatedly done before; but I was not now willing to trust her. Doubts of her fidelity led to other doubts. “If she is prepared to dishonor, she is prepared to destroy you!” said my familiar. This suggestion seized upon my brain, and while I measured out the minims, the busy fiend reminded me that I grasped the bane as well as the antidote in my hand. A stern, a terrible image of retributive justice presented itself before my thoughts. The feeling of an awful necessity grew strong within me. “Shall the adulterer alone perish? Shall the adultress escape?” The fiend answered with tremulous but stern passion--“She shall surely die!” “If she reveals not the truth in season,” I said in my secret soul; “if she claims not protection at my hands against the adulterer, she shall share his fate!” and with this resolve, even at the moment when I was measuring the antidote for myself, I resolved that the same vial should furnish the bane for her!