“I sought forgetfulness in dress and all sorts of dissipation. I could not bear to be alone; but sometimes Monsieur Le Conte’s business would call him away for days and weeks together. I had no child, and I could not always go out or contrive to have company in the house; and so at times I would try to drown my misery in the wine-cup.
“I did not become a drunkard, but two or three times I drank to intoxication.”
She paused, and, with a downward glance at her mutilated limb, sighed heavily.
“One wild, stormy night I was quite alone,” she continued. “The wind howled round the house like a legion of devils, as it seemed to me, and the air was full of eerie sounds. I had been more than usually depressed all day, and grew worse and worse as the hours crept slowly by. My husband I knew would not be home before morning; one servant was away, and the other had gone to bed in a distant part of the house.
“I wasn’t exactly afraid, but I kept thinking of Ethel, and how I had ill-used her, and that I should probably never see her again, till I was half crazed with remorse. At last I could not endure it any longer. I kept wine in a closet in my dressing-room; I went to it, poured out and drank one glass after another till I was quite stupefied.
“The last thing I remember is dropping into a chair beside the fire—a low-down grate filled with glowing coals; the next I knew I awoke in my bed, roused to consciousness by a sharp pain in my right arm.
“My husband, the servant-woman—who was crying bitterly—and two or three doctors were in the room. They were talking in low tones, and kept glancing at me.
“‘What is the matter?’ I asked; ‘what have you been doing to my hand that it pains me so?’ It was the surgeon nearest me who answered.
“‘Madame,’ he said in a compassionate tone, ‘it was so badly burned that we were obliged to take it off.’
“‘Off! burned!’ I shrieked, wild with terror and despair.