Letitia’s every nerve was trembling with terror, physical fear surmounting the first panic of discovery, which was a terror of the mind. She expected every moment an _accès_ of madness, in which she might be torn limb from limb--though at the same time calculating that the mad woman might loose her hold, and there might be a possibility of desperate flight, and of all the household on her side protecting her, and sudden relief from every terror. The nature of the emergency brought back to her after the first speechless horror her power of thought and calculation. She kept her eyes upon Mary’s eyes, still wild with fright, but awakened to a vigilant watch and keen attention to every indication of the other’s looks. But this was not the Mary whom Letitia had ever seen before. Her face had cleared like a sky after rain. It was like that sky ethereally pale, exalted, with a transparence that seemed to come from some light beyond. Mary was no longer a weak woman distracted by over tenderness, by visionary compunctions, humbleness, uncertainty--but clear and strong, with the quivering, expanding nostrils, the wide open eyes and trembling lips of inspiration. She held her captive still, though she stood a little apart from her, grasping fast in her own Letitia’s shut hand. “What did you put in it,” she said, “to kill my boy?” “Mary!” Letitia panted. “Why do you try to frighten me?--your boy?--you have told me you had no boy----” “That you tried to kill--before he was born--that you drove out of my knowledge--for I was mad. I know it all now--and you did it; what did you put in that to kill my boy?” There came a shriek from Letitia’s laboring breast. The words maddened her again into frantic terror. She made a wild effort to free her hand. Though it was a shriek, and intense as the loudest outcry, it was subdued by the other terror of being heard and discovered. Between the two she hung suspended, not able altogether to coerce nature, but still keeping its expression under. “Mary,” she cried, “let me go--let me go!” “What was it you put in it to kill him?” “Mary! Let me go--let me go!” “Not till you tell me; and then you shall go--where you will; away from here--away from my boy.”