children felt! Then, from out her silent and grim despair, stood forth,
fierce and prominent, the great fiend, Revenge.

By a monomania not uncommon to those who have made self the centre of
being, Lucretia referred to her own sullen history of wrong and passion
all that bore analogy to it, however distant. She had never been
enabled, without an intolerable pang of hate and envy, to contemplate
courtship and love in others. From the rudest shape to the most refined,
that master-passion in the existence, at least of woman,--reminding her
of her own brief episode of human tenderness and devotion,--opened every
wound and wrung every fibre of a heart that, while crime had indurated it
to most emotions, memory still left morbidly sensitive to one. But if
tortured by the sight of love in those who had had no connection with her
fate, who stood apart from her lurid orbit and were gazed upon only afar
(as a lost soul, from the abyss, sees the gleam of angels' wings within
some planet it never has explored), how ineffably more fierce and
intolerable was the wrath that seized her when, in her haunted
imagination, she saw all Susan's rapture at the vows of Mainwaring
mantling in Helen's face! All that might have disarmed a heart as hard,
but less diseased, less preoccupied by revenge, only irritated more the
consuming hate of that inexorable spirit. Helen's seraphic purity, her
exquisite, overflowing kindness, ever forgetting self, her airy
cheerfulness, even her very moods of melancholy, calm and seemingly
causeless as they were, perpetually galled and blistered that writhing,
preternatural susceptibility which is formed by the consciousness of
infamy, the dreary egotism of one cut off from the charities of the
world, with whom all mirth is sardonic convulsion, all sadness rayless
and unresigned despair.

Of the two, Percival inspired her with feelings the most akin to