For she has been the cause of all; she has thus changed and compromised the man whom she hoped to help to majesty and safety; she, the determined guider of the first blow, must see that wound become a widening crack in the walls of love and honor, to bury what she hoped to shelter; and she has grown powerless to shore them up, or to let them fall upon herself and not upon him. The breaking heart pulls down her wits into its ruin. Her undaunted mettle was but the over-bracing tonic of a moment, which punishes the structure it exalted. "A little water clears us of this deed: How easy is it, then!" So she and Heaven differed; and the husband found it was not easy. A piteous self-arraignment of love is quite as potent to destroy her as a conscience that can sleep no more. Night after night, her gentlewomen attend the repetition of scenes which she enacts, like a shadowy pageant in Hades of bygone life. Sleep's hammer tolls the castle-bell: "One, two! why, then 'tis time to do't." How Duncan bleeds! Who would have thought it of so old a man? And "here's the smell of the blood still:" how the fastidious woman, who loved the "perfumes of Arabia," sickens at it! The little hands fumble in the spectral water: they are not sweetened; the damned spot still clings. What! are these hands never to be clean again? But there's no time for washing out this deed; for, hark! there's Innocency knocking at the gate. Here no porter will be needed to usher dread disclosure into this sighing heart. "What's done cannot be undone." And what a reminiscence of her sense of wifehood and of the sacredness of pure domestic ties she wakens when she says, "The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?" Sent by her first impetuous push into Duncan's grave. In the "slumbery agitation" of the last night which shuts her from our view, she stretches a winsome hand toward the air-drawn husband of her dream: "Come, come! come, come! give me your hand! to bed, to bed, to bed!"