Gratia's Trials — page 209: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

900 GRATIA’S TRIALS. lived like a man, and I'll die like one; but se—she mustn't carry the blame and the burden any longer.” ‘©Of whom are you speaking, Robert ?” his mother asked, tremulously. —‘ Gratia—little Gratia Kempfield. She is as innocent asa lamb. It was Z that killed Ralph Miller.” ‘Robert! my son! Robert !” His mother’s voice rose in a shrill scream, and Alberta’s head sank on the arm of the chair she sat in. “It was J that killed my Uncle Ralph !” deliberately reiter- ated Robert Falconer; ‘‘and I'll tell you how it was, if this tightening at my throat will let me. I’ve carried the awful secret in my heart too long already ; it has dragged me down to hell, and made me the miserable wretch that lam. I came down that night, after Gratia had left my uncle—came softly down, in my slippered feet, and appealed to him for money to release me from the bondage of intolerable debt—disgraceful, dishonorable debt! JI might have known better; but I think I was a little mad that night. I had been drinking up in my own room until—God help me!—I had neither sense nor reason left. Of course, he refused. He was right enough in that ; buthe, too, lost his temper, and threatened to betray me to the world. Ina moment of- uncontrollable rage I stabbed him to the heart with the pocket-poniard I had gotten into the way of carrying about with me. I didn’t mean it. It wassome fiend entering into me for the moment. The next instant I would have given all my hopes in this world and the next to recall that blow ; but it was too late—he was dead. Then came all that mummery of the inquest. Nobody suspected me, and I knew they would not. That tray of china on the stairs was what saved me; yet all the string of evidence about the tray of china was not worth a straw. My mother’s dressing-room*door stood a little ajar. I did not know but that, late as it was, she might still be moving about; and so, to avoid passing through the strip of light that shone out across the hall, I swung myself : _ tcomicbooks:com—