She went back to the mahogany box, bent over it, brooded. She took out the carver again, the poultry carver with the long slender blade and the sharply pointed tip. She rubbed it stealthily along the stone coping of the sink, then she carried it back to the kitchen and slowly swished it backward and forward along the steel, doing everything as silently as possible. By and by she drew the edge of the blade along her finger. It was so keen that a thin red line of blood ran up. She went upstairs. In one hand she carried the flat, winking candlestick of brass, in the other the knife. Her fingers gripped the smooth golden-brown handle convulsively. The wicked point she held outward, her eyes fixed on it with much satisfaction. It was the best thing after all. The tool-house, with its rude weapons of earth, had not helped her. The knife-box had. She was at the door of the room where she believed Pamela was sleeping. Leaving the light outside, she turned the handle with a sure grasp. She knew that the door could not be locked; the key was weighting her long pocket. She had remembered to take away the key. The room was dark. She went like a slow, certain arrow to the bed. All her movements were slow, sure, horribly deliberate. She was used to killing things. She knew that the great secret of success was to keep cool. It didn’t seem to her any worse to kill a woman, when the woman was a distinct obstruction and hindrance, than it was to kill a bird. The knife was in her hand. She gripped the handle fiercely; the shining red bone of her wrist stood out. She shut her eyes; it was a habit of hers to shut her eyes at the very moment of killing--her ineradicable, nervous, womanly habit. She darted the point of the blade down, jabbing it furiously through the heaped-up bedclothes. Then, her eyes hardly open, her hand out to feel the way, she crept away, softly shutting the door behind her. The hard lines of her worn face had relaxed, the feverish shine of her eyes had given place to a calm light. The strained, hunted, uncertain expression had gone forever. The rebellion and misery, the desperate catechising of herself, were all ended. The question which, a year ago, had rung and rung in her head so persistently, which had rung again so noisily to-night when she heard that Pamela had come back, was answered. That question, that weary, bitter question which had chimed above her brow and made it ache so dully, would chime no more. There was silence, a strange feeling of ease and lightness above her eyes, where that maddening noise had been.