His failure to find her at home when he returned that night added to his alarm, especially as he remembered the vivid thunderstorm that had deluged the town in the afternoon. Nor, though she came in very soon and offered both excuses and explanations for her absence, did he experience any appreciable relief, or feel at all satisfied that he was not threatened with some secret and terrible catastrophe. Indeed, the air of vivid and feverish excitement which pervaded every look of hers from this time, making each morning and evening distinctive in his memory as a season of fresh fear and renewed suspense, was enough of itself to arouse this sense of an unknown, but surely approaching, danger. He saw she was on the look out for some event, he knew not what, and studied the papers as sedulously as she, in the hope of coming upon some revelation that should lay bare the secret of this new condition of hers. At last he thought he had found it. Coming home one day from the court, he called her into his presence, and, without pause or preamble, exclaimed, with almost cruel abruptness: "An event of possible interest to you has just taken place. The murderer of Mrs. Clemmens has just cut his throat." He saw before he had finished the first clause that he had struck at the very citadel of her terrors and her woe. At the end of the second sentence he knew, beyond all doubt now, what it was she had been fearing, if not expecting. Yet she said not a word, and by no movement betrayed that the steel had gone through and through her heart. A demon--the maddening demon of jealousy--gripped him for the first time with relentless force. "Ah, you have been looking for it?" he cried in a choked voice. "You know this man, then--knew him, perhaps, before the murder of Mrs. Clemmens; knew him, and--and, perhaps, loved him?" She did not reply. He struck his forehead with his hand, as if the moment was perfectly intolerable to him. "Answer," he cried. "Did you know Gouverneur Hildreth or not?" "_Gouverneur Hildreth?_" Oh, the sharp surprise, the wailing anguish of her tone! Mr. Orcutt stood amazed. "It is not he who has made this attempt upon his life!--not he!" she shrieked like one appalled. Perhaps because all other expression or emotion failed him, Mr. Orcutt broke forth into a loud and harrowing laugh. "And who else should it be?" he cried. "What other man stands accused of having murdered Widow Clemmens? You are mad, Imogene; you don't know what you say or what you do." "Yes, I am mad," she repeated--"mad!" and leaned her forehead forward on the back of a high chair beside which she had been standing, and hid her face and struggled with herself for a moment, while the clock went on ticking, and the wretched surveyer of her sorrow stood looking at her bended head like a man who does not know whether it is he or she who is in the most danger of losing his reason. At last a word struggled forth from between her clasped hands.