"Was he there, Mary? Did you speak to him?"
"No! no!" she said. "A dream, a wandering dream. What would you do if he came,—eh, cousin?"
"Nothing! nothing!" said Tom. "Go to bed."
"Bed, eh?" she answered. "Cousin; shooting is an easier death than hanging,—eh?"
Tom felt a creeping at the roots of his hair, as he answered,—"Yes, I believe so."
"Can you shoot straight, old man? Could you shoot straight and true if he stood there before you? Ah, you think you could now, but your hand would shake when you saw him."
"Go to bed, Mary," said Tom. "Don't talk like that. Let the future lie, cousin."
She turned and went to her room again.
All this was told me long after by Tom himself. Tom believed, or said he believed, that she was only sounding him, to see what his intentions were in case of a meeting with George Hawker. I would not for the world have had him suppose I disagreed with him; but I myself take another and darker interpretation of her strange words that night. I think, that she, never a very strong-minded person, and now, grown quite desperate from terror, actually contemplated her husband's death with complacency, nay, hoped, in her secret heart, that one mad struggle between him and Tom might end the matter for ever, and leave her a free woman. I may do her injustice, but I think I do not. One never knows what a woman of this kind, with strong passions and a not over-strong intellect, may be driven to. I knew her for forty years, and loved her for twenty. I knew in spite of all her selfishness and violence that there were many good, nay, noble points in her character; but I cannot disguise from myself that that night's conversation with Tom showed me a darker point in her character than I knew of before. Let us forget it. I would wish to have none but kindly recollections of the woman I loved so truly and so long.
For the secret must be told sooner or later,—I loved her before any of them. Before James Stockbridge, before George Hawker, before Thomas Troubridge, and I loved her more deeply and more truly than any of them. But the last remnant of that love departed from my heart twenty years ago, and that is why I can write of her so calmly now, and that is the reason, too, why I remain an old bachelor to this day.