Up to this time, Judge Parlin had not even taken his wife into his confidence, but as the matter took more and more of public form, he deemed it necessary that she should know, especially as he had begun to suspect that the men who were against him would hesitate at nothing--not even murder, to conceal the truth. It was an incautious hint dropped by him to this effect that first alarmed her, and this alarm was speedily increased to terror by threats that were conveyed to the judge from time to time, though as to the source he was never able to reach a solution. “He laughed at them,” she said, telling of these threats; “but that is a man’s way. A woman sits and thinks and dreads, because she cannot act. In the dead night, I heard footsteps prowling about the place--or thought I did, and I lay in an agony of terror--not for myself, but because it was not for me that the danger threatened. When he was at Norridgewock at court and would drive home after dark, I sat and trembled until I had him again in my arms and knew that once more the chance had passed him by. If there came a ring at the bell late at night, I would plead that he let me answer it, until I wrought myself into a nervous terror that I cannot even now remember without a shudder. It was the worse because he was so brave and never for a moment felt afraid. When he laughed at the threats, I grew cold to my very heart, for my fear for him told me that the danger he scorned was so real that some day it would fall and crush him. A woman’s love knows some things that a man’s brain can’t compass!” It seemed, however, that he attached importance of one kind to these threats, such as to induce him to guard the papers carefully, pending the time when he could duplicate them and place one set where they could not possibly be reached. But before this was even undertaken, Mrs. Parlin had become so alarmed that she urged her husband to abandon the matter and destroy the papers and let this be known where it would cause a cessation of the annoyance to which they were both subjected. But here she found him inflexible, and at last her terror reached such a pitch that she determined herself to steal and destroy the papers. It was some time before she was able to carry this resolve into execution, and during the delay she reached a point of terror little short of insanity. At last, under the impulse of fear intensified by a particularly boldly expressed threat, she took desperate chances and, as desperate chances will do at times, succeeded. She took the papers from her husband’s desk almost under his very eyes, and ever after had the cruel pain of knowing that the trust she had betrayed was so great that no suspicion of the betrayal had ever crossed his mind.