witness how I have struggled to repay her affection with my own! If I
cannot succeed, at least all that faith and gratitude can give are hers.
Yes, when I leave you, comforted by your forgiveness, your prayers, I
shall have strength to tear you from my heart; it is my duty, my fate.
With a firm step I will go to these abhorred nuptials. Oh, shudder not,
turn not away. Forgive the word; but I must speak,--my heart will out;
yes, abhorred nuptials! Between my grave and the altar, would--would
that I had a choice!"

From this burst, which in vain from time to time Susan had sought to
check, Mainwaring was startled by an apparition which froze his veins, as
a ghost from the grave. The door was thrown open, and Lucretia stood in
the aperture,--stood, gazing on him, face to face; and her own was so
colourless, so rigid, so locked in its livid and awful solemnity of
aspect that it was, indeed, as one risen from the dead.

Dismayed by the abrupt cry and the changed face of her lover, Susan
turned and beheld her sister. With the impulse of the pierced and loving
heart, which divined all the agony inflicted, she sprang to Lucretia's
side, she fell to the ground and clasped her knees.

"Do not heed, do not believe him; it is but the frenzy of a moment. He
spoke but to deceive me,--me, who loved him once! Mine alone, mine is
the crime. He knows all your worth. Pity--pity--pity on yourself, on
him, on me!"

Lucretia's eyes fell with the glare of a fiend upon the imploring face
lifted to her own. Her lips moved, but no sound was audible. At length
she drew herself from her sister's clasp, and walked steadily up to
Mainwaring. She surveyed him with a calm and cruel gaze, as if she