an you? Accident has
made me acquainted with one of his haunts. Give me a single promise, and
I will put you at least upon that clew,--weak, perhaps, but as yet the
sole one to be followed. Promise me that, only in defence of your own
life, not for mere jealousy, you will avail yourself of the knowledge,
and you shall know all I do!"

"Do you think," said Lucretia, in a calm, cold voice, "that it is for
jealousy, which is love, that I would murder all hope, all peace? For we
have here"--and she smote her breast--"here, if not elsewhere, a heaven
and a hell! Son, I will not harm your father, except in self-defence.
But tell me nothing that may make the son a party in the father's doom."

"The father slew the mother," muttered Gabriel, between his clenched
teeth; "and to me, you have wellnigh supplied her place. Strike, if need
be, in her name! If you are driven to want the arm of Pierre Guillot,
seek news of him at the Cafe Dufour, Rue S----, Boulevard du Temple. Be
calm now; I hear your husband's step."

A few days more, and Gabriel is gone! Wife and husband are alone with
each other. Lucretia has refused to depart. Then that mute coma of
horror, that suspense of two foes in the conflict of death; for
the subtle, prying eye of Olivier Dalibard sees that he himself is
suspected,--further he shuns from sifting! Glance fastens on glance, and
then hurries smilingly away. From the cup grins a skeleton, at the board
warns a spectre. But how kind still the words, and how gentle the tone;
and they lie down side by side in the marriage-bed,--brain plotting
against brain, heart loathing heart. It is a duel of life and death
between those sworn through life and beyond death at the altar. But it
is carried on with all the forms and courtesies of duel in the age of
chivalry. No conjugal wrangling, no slip of the tongue; the oil is on
the surface of the wave,--the monsters in the hell of the abyss war
invisibly below. At length, a dull torpor creeps over the woman; she
feels the taint in her veins,--the slow victory is begun. What mattered
all her vigilance and caution? Vainly glide from the fangs of the
serpent,--his very breath suffices to destroy! Pure seems the draught
and wholesome the viand,--that master of the science of murder needs
not the means of the bungler! Then, keen and strong from the creeping
lethargy started the fierce instinct of self and the ruthless impulse of
revenge. Not too late yet to escape; for those subt