"I know only that I never poisoned the woman," replied she. "Do you want to be hanged?" said he, with the reckless abruptness so peculiar a feature of his character, at the same time taking a rapid glance of her demeanour. He knew all about the firmness derived from the confidence of innocence, of which a certain class of rhapsodists make so much in a heroic way, and yet he had always entertained the heterodoxical notion that guilt is a firmer and often more composed condition than innocence, inasmuch as his experience led him to know that the latter is shaky, anxious, and sensitive, and the former stern and imperturbable. Nor did his quick mind want reasons for showing that such ought, by natural laws, to be the case; for it is never to be lost sight of, that, in so far as regards murder, which requires for its perpetration a peculiar form of mind and a most unnatural condition of the feelings, the same hardness of nerve which enables a man or woman to do the deed, serves equally well the purpose of helping them to stand up against the shame, while the innocent person, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand--the probable proportion of those who _cannot_ kill--has not the fortitude to withstand the ignominy, simply because he wants the power to slay. So without in his heart prejudging the woman, he drew his conclusions, true or false, from the impassibility of her demeanour. Her answer was ready---- "How could they hang an innocent woman?" "But they _do_ hang hundreds, who say just what you say," replied he. "What are you to make of that riddle? Come, did you ever buy any poison?--please leave out the rats." "No; neither for rats nor servants," was the composed reply. "And you never gave the woman a dose?" "Yes; I have given her medicine more than once." "Oh, a capital thing to save life; but you know her life was not saved. She died and was buried, and has been taken up; and I suspect it was not your jalap that was found in the body. But what interest had you in being so very kind to the woman who was to bring shame on your family by bearing a child to your son?" "I never knew she was in that way; but though I had known it, I could not have taken away her life." "Then, who gave her the poison?" "I do not know." "And cannot even suspect any one?" "No." "Good-bye!" he said, as he started up and hurried away; muttering to himself, as the jailer undid the bolts, "Always the same!--the women are always innocent; and yet we see them stretching ropes other than clothes' ropes every now and then."