there is a dark desire for the forbidden. This Lucretia felt; this her
studies cherished, and her thoughts brooded over. She detected, with the
quickness of her sex, the preceptor's stealthy aim. She started not at
the danger. Proud of her mastery over herself, she rather triumphed in
luring on into weakness this master-intelligence which had lighted up her
own,--to see her slave in her teacher; to despise or to pity him whom she
had first contemplated with awe. And with this mere pride of the
understanding might be connected that of the sex; she had attained the
years when woman is curious to know and to sound her power. To inflame
Dalibard's cupidity or ambition was easy; but to touch his heart,--that
marble heart!--this had its dignity and its charm. Strange to say, she
succeeded; the passion, as well as interests, of this dangerous and able
man became enlisted in his hopes. And now the game played between them
had a terror in its suspense; for if Dalibard penetrated not into the
recesses of his pupil's complicated nature, she was far from having yet
sounded the hell that lay, black and devouring, beneath his own. Not
through her affections,--those he scarce hoped for,--but through her
inexperience, her vanity, her passions, he contemplated the path to his
victory over her soul and her fate. And so resolute, so wily, so
unscrupulous was this person, who had played upon all the subtlest keys
and chords in the scale of turbulent life, that, despite the lofty smile
with which Lucretia at length heard and repelled his suit, he had no fear
of the ultimate issue, when all his projects were traversed, all his
mines and stratagems abruptly brought to a close, by an event which he
had wholly unforeseen,--the appearance of a rival; the ardent and almost
purifying love, which, escaping a while from all the demons he had
evoked, she had, with a girl's frank heart and impulse, conceived for
Mainwaring. And here, indeed, was the great crisis in Lucretia's life
and destiny. So interwoven with her nature had become the hard
calculations of the understanding; so habitual to her now was the zest