“At first I was stunned,” she said. “He may have been killed at once, for no sound reached me. Then all at once the wicked spirit put it into my head that here, by doing nothing, was a sure way out of my difficulties—was safety from that impish slanderer, was the bar removed to my favour in the eyes of one who had confided to me his detestation of children.”
Ned sprang back, almost striking at the crouching figure.
“Not me!” he raged; “I will have no responsibility—not any, for the inhuman deed, thrust upon me! And so you left him to his fate, and went home and ate and drank, feeding your beastly lusts and desires, while he—oh, devil, devil!”
She scrambled to her feet and made as if she would run from this new terror of a hate more ghastly than all she had suffered hitherto.
“Don’t kill me!” she whimpered. “Did you not tell me you hated children? and you said they could not feel as we do.”
He glared at her like a maniac.
“You left him; what is the need to say more?”
“I did not,” she moaned, wringing her hands as if to cleanse them of blood; “I came again on the third day, and I called to him, I prayed to him, but he never cried back one word. Then I thought, Perhaps he has climbed out and fled away.”
“Liar! you are a liar! Why, then, did you seek to hide your crime by a blasphemous lie?”
“I have suffered,” she answered only, like one before the judgment-seat.