‘I hate him,’ she muttered, when she was alone in the passage, stamping her foot as if she had trodden upon a venomous insect. She went upstairs, and again sat down, half undressed, upon the floor, to look at the diamond necklace. She had a childish love of the gems--a delight in looking at them--which differed very little from her feelings when she was fifteen years younger, and longed for a blue bead necklace exposed for sale in the quaint old market-place at Auray. ‘I shall send them back to him to-morrow,’ she said to herself. ‘The diamonds are beautiful--and I am getting tired of my life here, and I know that Jack hates me--but that man is too horrible--and--I am an honest woman.’ She flung herself on her knees beside the bed, in the attitude of prayer, but not to pray. She had lost the habit of prayer soon after she left her native province. She was sobbing passionately for the loss of her husband’s love, with a dim consciousness that it was by her own degradation she had forfeited his regard. ‘I’ve been a good wife to him,’ she murmured in broken syllables, ‘better than ever I was----’ And then speech lost itself in convulsive sobs, and she cried herself to sleep. CHAPTER XVII. MURDER. Murder! an awful word under the most ordinary circumstances of every-day life--an awful word even when spoken of an event that happened long ago, or afar off. But what a word shouted in the dead of night, through the close darkness of a sleeping house, thrilling the ear of slumber, freezing the blood in the half-awakened sleepers’ veins. Such a shout--repeated with passionate clamour--scared the inhabitants of the Cibber Street lodging-house at three o’clock in the winter morning, still dark as deepest night. Mrs. Rawber heard it in her back bedroom on the ground floor. It penetrated confusedly--not as a word, but as a sound of fear and dread--to the front kitchen, where Mrs. Evitt, the landlady, slept on an ancient press bedstead, which by day made believe to be a book-case. Lastly, Desrolles, who seemed to have slept more heavily than the other two on that particular night, came rushing out of his room to ask the meaning of that hideous summons. They all met on the first-floor landing, where Jack Chicot stood on the threshold of his wife’s bedroom, with a candle in his hand, the flickering flame making a patch of sickly yellow light amidst surrounding gloom--a faint light in which Jack Chicot’s pallid countenance looked like the face of a ghost. ‘What is the matter?’ Desrolles asked the two women, simultaneously. ‘My wife has been murdered. My God, it is too awful! See--see----’