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She took up the lamp. The room had got darker; the rain still beat against the glass. But she led me to the fire and made me sit and sat beside me. Her silk skirts rose in a rush, then sank. She put the lamp upon the floor, spread the paper flat, and began to show me the words she had written, one by one.

But Mrs Sucksby rose from Gentleman's side. Her taffeta dress was soaked in his blood, the brooch of diamonds at her bosom turned to a brooch of rubies. Her hands were crimson, from fingertrip to wrist. She looked like the picture of a murderess from one of the penny papers.

(...) The chimneys grew taller, the roads and rivers wider, the threads of smoke more thick, the farther off the country spread; until at last, at the farthest point of all, they made a smudge, a stain, a darkness (...) a darkness that was broken, here and there, where the sun caught panes of glass and the golden tips of domes and steeples, with glittering points of light.

I supposed she guessed I had been trying to escape. I went back to my bed. She stood at the door with the other nurse and said something to her in a murmur. The other nurse wrinkled her nose. Then they looked me over in the same cool, nasty way that I had seen other nurses look at me before.

The words drop away. In reaching, she has moved her head: the light from the street-lamp, and from the sliver of tarnished moon, falls full upon her, and all at once I see her face - the brown of her own eye, and her own pale cheek - and her lip, that is plump and must, I understand suddenly, must once have been plumper ... She wets her mouth. 'Dear girl,' she says. 'My own, my own dear girl -'

I give myself up to darkness; and wish I may never again be required to lift my head to the light.

She keeps her eyes on mine, but speaks to Richard. Her voice is thick with the tears of age, or of emotion.
'Good boy,' she says.

And so you see it is love - not scorn, not malice; only love - that makes me harm her, in the end.

And it is as I am standing, feeling the blood rush awkwardly into my cheek, that a girl comes to my door with a letter from Richard. I have forgotten to expect it. I have forgotten to think of our plan, our flight, our marriage, the looming asylum gate. I have forgotten to think of him. I must think of him now, however. I take the letter and, trembling, break its seal.

This is not my bed, and the hour for bed has sounded and passed, and there are none of the things - my mother's portrait, my box, my maid - about me that I like to have close while I lie sleeping. But tonight, all things are out of their order; all my patterns have been disturbed. My liberty beckons: gaugeless, fearful, inevitable as death.