“Hit the floor with heel and toe
'Till heaven help the boords below.”
“Yes, I am mad, or soon will be,” she said in a hard way. “I thought of that this morning when I crossed the river coming home from church. It would soon be over there, I thought. No more trouble, no more dreams, no more waking in the night to hear the breathing of the one beside me, and the voice out of the darkness crying——”
“Kate, what are you saying?” interrupted Philip.
“Oh, you needn't think I'm a bad woman because I ask you take me away from my husband. If I were that, I could brazen it out perhaps, and live on here, and pretend to forget; many a woman does, they say. And I'm not afraid that he will ever find me out either. I have only to close my lips, and he will never know. But I shall know, Philip Christian,” she said, with a defiant look into his eyes as he raised them.
Her reproaches hurt him less than her piteous entreaties, and in a moment she was sobbing again. “Oh, what can God do but let me die! I thought He would when the child came; but He did not, and then—am I a wicked woman, after all?—I prayed that He would take my innocent baby, anyway.”
But she dashed the tears away in anger at her weakness, and said, “I'm not a bad woman, Philip Christian; and that's why I won't live here any longer. There is something you have never guessed, and I have never told you; but I must tell you now, for I can keep my secret no longer.”
He raised his head with a noise in his ears that was like the flapping of wings in the dark.
“Your secret, Kate?”
“How happy I was,” she said. “Perhaps I was to blame—I loved you so, and was so fearful of losing you. Perhaps you thought of all that had passed between us as something that would go back and back as time went on and on. But it has been coming the other way ever since. Yes, and as long as I live and as long as the child lives——”
Her voice quivered like the string of a bow and stopped. He rose to his feet.