A kind of awakened conscience, too, resulting not from any principle of true repentance, but from superstitious alarm and a conviction that the Prophet had communicated to Sarah a certain secret connected with her, which she dreaded so much to have known, had for some time past rendered her whole life a singular compound of weak terror, ill-temper, gloom, and a kind of conditional repentance, which depended altogether upon the fact of her secret being known.

In this mood it was that she left the cabin as we have described.
"I'm not fit to die," she said to herself, after she had gone--"an' that's the second offer for my life she has made.

Any way, it's the best of my play to lave them; an' above all, to keep away from her.

That's the second attempt; and I know to a certainty, that if she makes a third one, it'll do for me.

Oh, no doubt of that--the third time's always the charm!--an' into my heart that unlucky knife 'ill go, if she ever tries it a third time! They tell me," she proceeded, soliloquizing, as she was in the habit of doing, "that the inquest is to be held in a day or two, an' that the crowner was only unwell a trifle, and hadn't the sickness afther all.