st week."

"It is strange," said the lawyer.

"And he was getting on so well," muttered a hungry-looking man.

"And his place is vacant!" repeated the employee, as he quitted the
crowd abstractedly.

In the house of Olivier Dalibard sits Lucretia alone, and in her own
usual morning-room. The officer appointed to such tasks by the
French law has performed his visit, and made his notes, and expressed
condolence with the widow, and promised justice and retribution, and
placed his seal on the locks till the representatives of the heir-at-law
shall arrive; and the heir-at-law is the very boy who had succeeded
so unexpectedly to the wealth of Jean Bellanger the contractor! But
Lucretia has obtained beforehand all she wishes to save from the rest.
An open box is on the floor, into which her hand drops noiselessly a
volume in manuscript. On the forefinger of that hand is a ring, larger
and more massive than those usually worn by women,--by Lucretia never
worn before. Why should that ring have been selected with such care from
the dead man's hoards? Why so precious the dull opal in that cumbrous
setting? From the hand the volume drops without sound into the box, as
those whom the secrets of the volume instruct you to destroy may drop
without noise into the grave. The trace of some illness, recent and
deep, nor conquered yet, has ploughed lines in that young countenance,
and dimmed the light of those searching eyes. Yet courage! the poison
is arrested, the poisoner is no more. Minds like thine, stern woman, are
cased in coffers of steel, and the rust as yet has gnawed no deeper than
the surface. So over that face, stamped with bodily suffering, plays a
calm smile of triumph. The schemer has baffled the schemer! Turn now
to the right, pass by that narrow corridor: you are in the
marriage-chamber; the windows are closed; tall tapers burn at the foot
of the bed. Now go back to that narrow corridor. Disregarded, thrown
aside, are a cloth and a besom: the cloth is wet still; but here and
there the red stains are dry, and clotted as with bloody glue; and the
hairs of the besom start up, torn and ragged, as if the bristles had
a sense of some horror, as if things inanimate still partook of men's
dread at men's deeds. If you passed through the corridor and saw in
the shadow of the wall that homeliest of instruments cast away and
forgotten, you would smile at the slatternly housework. But if you knew
that a corpse had been borne down