"Oh it was easily done. It was only two words. But here I am."
Her face was now less hard for him. "And what two words?"
"'You know, Mr. Gedge, that it simply won't do.' That was all. But it was the way such a man says them."
"I'm glad then," Mrs. Gedge frankly averred, "that he is such a man. How did you ever think it could do?"
"Well, it was my critical sense. I didn't ever know I had one—till They came and (by putting me here) waked it up in me. Then I had somehow, don't you see? to live with it; and I seemed to feel that, with one thing and another, giving it time and in the long run, it might, it ought to, come out on top of the heap. Now that's where, he says, it simply won't 'do.' So I must put it—I have put it—at the bottom."
"A very good place then for a critical sense!" And Isabel, more placidly now, folded her work. "If, that is, you can only keep it there. If it doesn't struggle up again."
"It can't struggle." He was still before the fire, looking round at the warm low room, peaceful in the lamplight, with the hum of the kettle for the ear, with the curtain drawn over the leaded casement, a short moreen curtain artfully chosen by Isabel for the effect of the olden time, its virtue of letting the light within show ruddy to the street. "It's dead," he went on; "I killed it just now."
He really spoke so that she wondered. "Just now?"
"There in the other place—I strangled it, poor thing, in the dark. If you'll go out and see, there must be blood. Which, indeed," he added, "on an altar of sacrifice, is all right. But the place is for ever spattered."
"I don't want to go out and see." She locked her hands over the needlework folded on her knee, and he knew, with her eyes on him, that a look he had seen before was in her face. "You're off your head, you know, my dear, in a way." Then, however, more cheeringly: "It's a good job it hasn't been too late."