“The next day was Sunday.  Nothing happened.  I went to chapel.  Mere habit.  It did me no good.  He got on a little with the drinking—­but still cunningly, by slow degrees.  I knew by experience that this meant a long fit, and a bad one, to come.

“Monday, there were the odd jobs about the house to be begun.  He was by this time just sober enough to do his work, and just tipsy enough to take a spiteful pleasure in persecuting his wife.  He went out and got the things he wanted, and came back and called for me.  A skilled workman like he was (he said) wanted a journeyman under him.  There were things which it was beneath a skilled workman to do for himself.  He was not going to call in a man or a boy, and then have to pay them.  He was going to get it done for nothing, and he meant to make a journeyman of me. Half tipsy and half sober, he went on talking like that, and laying out his things, all quite right, as he wanted them.  When they were ready he straightened himself up, and he gave me his orders what I was to do.

“I obeyed him to the best of my ability.  Whatever he said, and whatever he did, I knew he was going as straight as man could go to his own death by my hands.

“The rats and mice were all over the house, and the place generally was out of repair.  He ought to have begun on the kitchen-floor; but (having sentence pronounced against him) he began in the empty parlors on the ground-floor.

“These parlors were separated by what is called a ’lath-and-plaster wall.’  The rats had damaged it.  At one part they had gnawed through and spoiled the paper, at another part they had not got so far.  The landlord’s orders were to spare the paper, because he had some by him to match it.  My husband began at a place where the paper was whole.  Under his directions I mixed up—­I won’t say what.  With the help of it he got the paper loose from the wall, without injuring it in any way, in a long hanging strip.  Under it was the plaster and the laths, gnawed away in places by the rats.  Though strictly a paperhanger by trade, he could be plasterer too when he liked.  I saw how he cut away the rotten laths and ripped off the plaster; and (under his directions again) I mixed up the new plaster he wanted, and handed him the new laths, and saw how he set them.  I won’t say a word about how this was done either.

“I have a reason for keeping silence here, which is, to my mind, a very dreadful one.  In every thing that my husband made me do that day he was showing me (blindfold) the way to kill him, so that no living soul, in the police or out of it, could suspect me of the deed.

“We finished the job on the wall just before dark.  I went to my cup of tea, and he went to his bottle of gin.

“I left him, drinking hard, to put our two bedrooms tidy for the night.  The place that his bed happened to be set in (which I had never remarked particularly before) seemed, in a manner of speaking, to force itself on my notice now.