Lucretia sitting with Walter Ardworth's open letter in her hand, and
turning with a preternatural excitement that seemed almost like
aberration of mind, from the grim and horrid topic which he invited, to
thoughts of wealth and power and triumph and exulting prophecies of the
fame her son should achieve. He looked but on the blackness of the gulf,
and shuddered; her vision overleaped it, and smiled on the misty palaces
her fancy built beyond.

Late in the evening, before she retired to rest, Helen knocked gently at
her aunt's door. A voice, quick and startled, bade her enter; she came
in, with her sweet, caressing look, and took Lucretia's hand, which
struggled from the clasp. Bending over that haggard brow, she said
simply, yet to Lucretia's ear the voice seemed that of command, "Let me
kiss you this night!" and her lips pressed that brow. The murderess
shuddered, and closed her eyes; when she opened them, the angel visitor
was gone.

Night deepened and deepened into those hours from the first of which we
number the morn, though night still is at her full. Moonbeam and
starbeam came through the casements shyly and fairylike as on that night
when the murderess was young and crimeless, in deed, if not in thought,--
that night when, in the book of Leechcraft, she meted out the hours in
which the life of her benefactor might still interpose between her
passion and its end. Along the stairs, through the hall, marched the
armies of light, noiseless and still and clear as the judgments of God
amidst the darkness and shadow of mortal destinies. In one chamber
alone, the folds, curtained close, forbade all but a single ray; that ray
came direct as the stream from a lantern; as the beam reflected back from
an eye,--as an eye it seemed watchful and steadfast through the dark; it
shot along the floor,--it fell at the foot of the bed.