-

"Sweet innocence, fresh from the nursery! Would it not be sin to suffer
the world to mar it? You hear the prayer: why not grant it, and let the
flower 'turn to use below'?"

"Ah, but could it wither first!" muttered Lucretia, with an accent of
suppressed rage. "Do you think that her--that his--daughter is to me but
a vulgar life to be sacrificed merely for gold? Imagine away your sex,
man! Women only know what I--such as I, woman still--feel in the
presence of the pure! Do you fancy that I should not have held death a
blessing if death could have found me in youth such as Helen is? Ah,
could she but live to suffer! Die! Well, since it must be, since my son
requires the sacrifice, do as you will with the victim that death
mercifully snatches from my grasp. I could have wished to prolong her
life, to load it with some fragment of the curse her parents heaped upon
me,--baffled love, and ruin, and despair! I could have hoped, in this
division of the spoil, that mine had been the vengeance, if yours the
gold. You want the life, I the heart,--the heart to torture first; and
then--why then more willingly than I do now, could I have thrown the
carcass to the jackal!"

"Listen!" began Varney; when the door opened and Helen herself stood
unconsciously smiling at the threshold.




CHAPTER VI.