Page:The New Penelope.djvu/59



"He could afford to be remarked upon when he was a free pensioner upon a woman's bounty, and in receipt of a fine income which I earned for him by ceaseless toil. I can see him now sitting at the bottom of the table, my table, flourishing his white hands, and stroking his flowing blonde beard occasionally as something very gratifying to his vanity was said; talking and laughing with perfect unconcern, while he fattened himself at my expense; while I, who earned and prepared his dinner for him, gasped half fainting in the heat of a kitchen, sick in heart and body. Do you wonder that I hated him?"

"I wonder more that you did not kill him," I said; feeling that this would have been a case of 'justifiable homicide.'

"The impulse certainly came to me at times to kill him; or if not exactly that, to wish him dead. Yet when the opportunity came to be revenged upon him by fate itself, I interfered to save him. That was strange, was it not? To be suffering as I suffered at this man's hands, and yet when he was in peril to have compassion upon him?"

"You could not alter your nature," I said, "which is, as I told you before, thoroughly sound and sweet. It goes against us to suffer wrong; but it goes still harder with us to do wrong. Besides, you had your religious training to help you."

"I had the temptation, all the same. It happened in this way: One night I was lying awake, as I usually did, until I heard Mr. Seabrook come in and go to his room. He came in rather later than usual, and I listened until all was still in the house, that I might sleep the more safely and soundly afterwards. I had, however, become so nervously wakeful by this time that the much needed and coveted sleep refused to visit me, and I laid tossing feverishly upon my bed when I became aware that there was a smell of fire in the air. Rapidly dressing, I took Benton in my arms and hastened down stairs, to have him where