What can he say to her? By what words--save words of entreaty to her to put again the chain about his neck and the fetters upon his limbs--can he appease or comfort her? And sooner than utter such words, he would fall dead at her feet. 'Wretched superstition!' she says between her teeth, still rending the morsel of lawn in her fingers; 'how could _I_, of all people, have been such a fool as to be conquered by it? What did it matter to the Powers above--what did they care whether I kept or threw away the one miserable bit of consolation I had in my hideous life? The child would have got well all the same, while I--I--but perhaps' (her tone changing to one of alert suspicion), 'perhaps even then you had come to an understanding, you and she. Perhaps even then you were hoodwinking me. I was so easy to hoodwink--I, of all people, who had always thought myself so wide awake--ha! ha!' Again that dreadful laugh assails his ear, and makes him shiver as if it were December's blasts that were biting, not May's breezes kissing his cheek. 'I never hoodwinked you!' he answers, in an agitation hardly inferior to her own; 'it was always plain-sailing between us. I went away because you sent me.' 'And you took me at my word?' cries she wildly. 'Yes, I know that then, at that moment, I meant you to take me at it; but I was out of my mind. Hundreds of people less mad than I was then are in Bedlam. You might as well have listened to the ravings of a lunatic as to mine that day; and--you--took--me--at--my word!' Her speech, which in its beginning was shrill and rapid, ends almost in a whisper. 'I thought you meant it,' he says miserably; 'before God, I thought you meant it!' 'The wish was father to the thought,' she says, again breaking into that laugh which jars upon him far more than would any tears or revilings; 'you believed it because you wished it. I showed you a handsome way out of your dilemma. I played into your hands. Without knowing it--oh, I think that you will believe it was without knowing it--I played into your hands. Without hurting my feelings--without quite giving the lie to all your glib vows--without any disagreeable shuffling--you were free! I set you free! _I!_ Oh, the humour of it! I wonder how you could have kept any decent countenance that morning! and I--I--never saw it. Oh, I must have been blinder than any mole or bat not to have seen it, but I did not!' She pauses, as if suffocated; but in a moment or two has recovered breath and composure enough to resume: