I heard her lips kissing the stone--I saw her hands beating on it
passionately. The sound and the sight deeply affected me. I
stooped down, and took the poor helpless hands tenderly in mine,
and tried to soothe her.

It was useless. She snatched her hands from me, and never moved
her face from the stone. Seeing the urgent necessity of quieting
her at any hazard and by any means, I appealed to the only anxiety
that she appeared to feel, in connection with me and with my
opinion of her--the anxiety to convince me of her fitness to be
mistress of her own actions.

"Come, come," I said gently. "Try to compose yourself, or you
will make me alter my opinion of you. Don't let me think that the
person who put you in the Asylum might have had some excuse----"

The next words died away on my lips. The instant I risked that
chance reference to the person who had put her in the Asylum she
sprang up on her knees. A most extraordinary and startling change
passed over her. Her face, at all ordinary times so touching to
look at, in its nervous sensitiveness, weakness, and uncertainty,
became suddenly darkened by an expression of maniacally intense
hatred and fear, which communicated a wild, unnatural force to
every feature. Her eyes dilated in the dim evening light, like
the eyes of a wild animal. She caught up the cloth that had
fallen at her side, as if it had been a living creature that she
could kill, and crushed it in both her hands with such convulsive
strength, that the few drops of moisture left in it trickled down
on the stone beneath her.