humanity. For him, despite her bitter memories of his father, she felt
something of compassion, and shrank from the touch of his frank hand in
remorse. She had often need to whisper to herself that his life was an
obstacle to the heritage of the son of whom, as we have seen, she was in
search, and whom, indeed, she believed she had already found in John
Ardworth; that it was not in wrath and in vengeance that this victim was
to be swept into the grave, but as an indispensable sacrifice to a
cherished object, a determined policy. As, in the studies of her youth,
she had adopted the Machiavelism of ancient State-craft as a rule
admissible in private life, so she seemed scarcely to admit as a crime
that which was but the removal of a barrier between her aim and her end.
Before she had become personally acquainted with Percival she had
rejected all occasion to know him. She had suffered Varney to call upon
him as the old protege of Sir Miles, and to wind into his intimacy,
meaning to leave to her accomplice, when the hour should arrive, the
dread task of destruction. This not from cowardice, for Gabriel had once
rightly described her when he said that if she lived with shadows she
could quell them, but simply because, more intellectually unsparing than
constitutionally cruel (save where the old vindictive memories thoroughly
unsexed her), this was a victim whose pangs she desired not to witness,
over whose fate it was no luxury to gloat and revel. She wished not to
see nor to know him living, only to learn that he was no more, and that
Helen alone stood between Laughton and her son. Now that he had himself,
as if with predestined feet, crossed her threshold, that he, like Helen,
had delivered himself into her toils, the hideous guilt, before removed
from her hands, became haunting, fronted her face to face, and filled her
with a superstitious awe.

Meanwhile, her outward manner to both her meditated victims, if moody and
fitful at times, was not such as would have provoked suspicion even in