I read the first lines on the title-page—
A COMPLETE REPORT OF THE TRIAL OF EUSTACE MACALLAN.
I stopped and looked up at her. She started back from me with a scream of terror. I looked down again at the title-page, and read the next lines—
FOR THE ALLEGED POISONING OF HIS WIFE.
There, God’s mercy remembered me. There the black blank of a swoon swallowed me up.
CHAPTER XI. THE RETURN TO LIFE.
My first remembrance when I began to recover my senses was the remembrance of Pain—agonizing pain, as if every nerve in my body were being twisted and torn out of me. My whole being writhed and quivered under the dumb and dreadful protest of Nature against the effort to recall me to life. I would have given worlds to be able to cry out—to entreat the unseen creatures about me to give me back to death. How long that speechless agony held me I never knew. In a longer or shorter time there stole over me slowly a sleepy sense of relief. I heard my own labored breathing. I felt my hands moving feebly and mechanically, like the hands of a baby. I faintly opened my eyes and looked round me—as if I had passed through the ordeal of death, and had awakened to new senses in a new world.
The first person I saw was a man—a stranger. He moved quietly out of my sight; beckoning, as he disappeared, to some other person in the room.
Slowly and unwillingly the other person advanced to the sofa on which I lay. A faint cry of joy escaped me; I tried to hold out my feeble hands. The other person who was approaching me was my husband!