She grew weaker and weaker, great hollows came into her pale cheeks, her blue eyes looked larger than ever with the purple shadows beneath them, while the one longing cry of her heart was always for freedom, freedom, from this dreadful house, through whose whole extent the maniacal shrieks of the mad Mrs. Fielding echoed night and day.
After weeks of this terrible life there came a day when the horror-haunted house became unnaturally still and quiet. Mrs. Fielding had been removed to an insane asylum, and her wild cries no longer echoed on the shuddering air.
Jewel knew that at the next meeting of the county court a guardian must be appointed for herself and her sister until her mother's recovery, and she resolved to finish her awful work before any prying, perhaps suspicious stranger should come into the house.
More than eight months had elapsed since Laurie Meredith had gone away, and Jewel knew that the time of Flower's trouble was near at hand.
She had been holding back one terrible thing for a coup d'état at the last, and she decided now that the fitting moment had arrived in which to startle Flower into a slightly premature illness and thus make sure of her death at once.
It was a fiend's plan, a fiend's wish, but Jewel never faltered in her deadly purpose. Her evil passions drove her on to the commission of a deed that, call it by what specious name she chose in her own mind, would be no less than murder.
So she went into Flower's room one night carrying a lighted lamp in one hand and a newspaper in the other.
In this long, weary month she had never permitted Flower the use of a lamp at night, thinking that the long, interminable hours of darkness would add to her torture, as indeed they had done most effectually.
So the poor girl started up from her bed in alarm, dazed by the brilliant light of the lamp, and filled with a wild hope that Jewel was about to relent toward her, she exclaimed, wildly:
"Ah, sister, you bring me a light. You begin to relent. Blessings on you, dear Jewel! Now, give me food, too, I am so hungry, so thirsty, and the air of this closed room stifles me! Open the window and let the sweet air of spring come in! Then bring me food, food, for I am starving."