"That's famous. That's just as it ort. With that and with the cookery book, Jonas'll just adore you. There's nuthin' like that for makin' a home homely." "And you'll come to me?" "My dear, if alive and well, without fail." CHAPTER XXVII. POISON. The Broom-Squire did not recover from his wound with the rapidity that might have been expected. His blood was fevered, his head in a whirl. He could not forget what his sister had said to him relative to Mehetabel and Iver. Jealousy gnawed in his heart like a worm. That the painter should admire her for her beauty--that was nothing--who did not admire her? Had she not been an object of wonder and praise ever since she had bloomed into womanhood at the Ship? That he was envied his beautiful wife did not surprise him. He valued her because begrudged him by others. He looked at himself in a broken glass he had, and sneered and laughed when he saw his own haggard face, and contrasted it with that of the artist. It was true that he had seen nothing to render him suspicious, when Iver came to his house, but he had not always been present. He had actually forced his wife against her wishes to go to the tavern where Iver was, had thrust her, so to speak, into his arms. He remembered her call in the Marsh to the spirits to rid her of some one, and he could not believe her explanation. He remembered how that to save Iver, she had thrust the muzzle of the gun against her own side, and had done battle with him for mastery over the weapon. Incapable of conceiving of honor, right feeling, in any breast, he attributed the worst motives to Mehetabel--he held her to be sly, treacherous, and false. Jonas had never suffered from any illness, and he made a bad patient now. He was irritable, and he spared neither his wife, who attended to him with self-denying patience, nor his sister, who came in occasionally. Mehetabel hoped that his pain and dependence on her might soften his rancorous spirit, and break down his antagonism towards her and every one. The longer his recovery was delayed, the more unrestrained became his temper. He spared no one. It seemed as though his wife's patience and attention provoked into virulent activity all that was most venomous and vicious in his nature. Possibly he was aware that he was unworthy of her, but could not or would not admit this to himself. His hatred of Iver grew to frenzy. He felt that he was morally the inferior of both the artist and of his own wife. When he was at their mercy they had spared his life, and that life of his lay between them and happiness. Had he not sought both theirs? Would he have scrupled to kill either had one of them been in the same helpless position at his feet? He had come forth in sorry plight from that struggle, and now he was weakened by his accident, and unable to watch Mehetabel as fully as he would have wished. The caution spoken by the surgeon that he should not retard his recovery by impatience and restlessness was unheeded.