contemplating at that very hour the foulest and most hideous guilt, drew
back, appalled.

Madame Dalibard resumed, and in a somewhat softer tone, but softened only
by the anguish of despair.

"Oh, had it been otherwise, what might I have been! Given over from that
hour to the very incarnation of plotting crime, none to resist the evil
impulse of my own maddening heart, the partner, forced on me by fate,
leading me deeper and deeper into the inextricable hell,--from that hour
fraud upon fraud, guilt upon guilt, infamy heaped on infamy, till I stand
a marvel to myself that the thunderbolt falls not, that Nature thrusts
not from her breast a living outrage on all her laws! Was I not
justified in the desire of retribution? Every step that I fell, every
glance that I gave to the gulf below, increased but in me the desire for
revenge. All my acts had flowed from one fount: should the stream roll
pollution, and the fount spring pure?"

"You have had your revenge on your rival and her husband."

"I had it, and I passed on!" said Lucretia, with nostrils dilated as with
haughty triumph; "they were crushed, and I suffered them to live! Nay,
when, by chance, I heard of William Mainwaring's death, I bowed down my
head, and I almost think I wept. The old days came back upon me. Yes, I
wept! But I had not destroyed their love. No, no; there I had miserably
failed. A pledge of that love lived. I had left their hearth barren;
Fate sent them a comfort which I had not foreseen. And suddenly my hate
returned, my wrongs rose again, my vengeance was not sated. The love
that had destroyed more than my life,--my soul,--rose again and cursed me
in the face of Helen. The oath which I took when I kissed my rival's