“Could I speak of her otherwise?”

The sudden change in Mrs. Simcoe’s expression conveyed her thought to him before her words: 

“No, no! not of her, but—­”

She stopped, as if wrestling with a fierce inward agony.  The veins on her forehead were swollen, and her eyes flashed with singular light.  It was not clear whether she were trying to say something to conceal something, or simply to recover her self-command.  It was a terrible spectacle, and Lawrence Newt felt as if he must veil his eyes, as if he had no right to look upon this great agony of another.

“But—­” said he, mechanically, as if by repeating her last word to help her in her struggle.

The sad, severe woman stood before him in the darkening twilight, erect, and more than erect, drawn back from him, and quivering and defiant.  She was silent for an instant; then, leaning forward and reaching toward him, she took the miniature from Lawrence Newt, closed her hand over it convulsively, and gasped in a tone that sounded like a low, wailing cry: 

“But of him.”

Lawrence Newt raised his eyes from the vehement woman to the portrait that hung above her.

In the twilight that lost loveliness glimmered down into his very heart with appealing pathos.  Perhaps those parted lips in their red bloom had spoken to him—­lips so long ago dust!  Perhaps those eyes, in the days forever gone—­gone with hopes and dreams, and the soft lustre of youth—­had looked into his own, had answered his fond yearning with equal fondness.  By all that passionate remembrance, by a lost love, by the early dead, he felt himself conjured to speak, nor suffer his silence even to seem to shield a crime.

“And why not of him?” he began, calmly, and with profound melancholy rather than anger.  “Why not of him, who did not hesitate to marry the woman whom he knew loved another, and whom the difference of years should rather have made his daughter than his wife?  Why not of him, who brutally confessed, when she was his wife, an earlier and truer love of his own, and so murdered her slowly, slowly—­not with blows of the hand, oh no!—­not with poison in her food, oh no!” cried Lawrence Newt, warming into bitter vehemence, clenching his hand and shaking it in the air, “but who struck her blows on the heart—­who stabbed her with sharp icicles of indifference—­who poisoned her soul with the tauntings of his mean suspicions—­mean and false—­and the meaner because he knew them to be false?  Why not of him, who—­”

“Stop! in the name of God!” she cried, fiercely, raising her hand as if she appealed to Heaven.

It fell again.  The hard voice sank to a tremulous, pitiful tone: 

“Oh! stop, if you, are a man!”

They stood opposite each other in utter silence.  The light had almost faded.  The face in the picture was no longer visible.

Bewildered and awed by the passionate grief of his companion, Lawrence Newt said, gently,