understanding that our project on Helen should repay me, should enable
me, perhaps undetected, to restore the sums illegally abstracted, or, at
the worst, to confess to Stubmore--whose character I well know--that,
oppressed by difficulties, I had yielded to temptation, that I had forged
his name (as I had forged his father's) as an authority to sell the
capital from the bank, and that now, in replacing the money, I repaid my
error and threw myself on his indulgence, on his silence. I say that I
know enough of the man to know that I should be thus cheaply saved, or at
the worst, I should have but to strengthen his compassion by a bribe to
his avarice; but if I cannot replace the money, I am lost."

"Well, well," said Lucretia; "the money you shall have, let me but find
my son, and--"

"Grant me patience!" cried Varney, impetuously. "But what can your son
do, if found, unless you endow him with the heritage of Laughton? To do
that, Helen, who comes next to Percival St. John in the course of the
entail, must cease to live! Have I not aided, am I not aiding you
hourly, in your grand objects? This evening I shall see a man whom I
have long lost sight of, but who has acquired in a lawyer's life the true
scent after evidence: if that evidence exist, it shall be found. I have
just learned his address. By tomorrow he shall be on the track. I have
stinted myself to save from the results of the last forgery the gold to
whet his zeal. For the rest, as I have said, your design involves the
removal of two lives. Already over the one more difficult to slay the
shadow creeps and the pall hangs. I have won, as you wished, and as was
necessary, young St. John's familiar acquaintance; when the hour comes,
he is in my hands."

Lucretia smiled sternly. "So!" she said, between her ground teeth, "the