erstanding that our project on Helen
should repay me, should enable me, perhaps undetected, to restore
the sums illegally abstracted, or, at the worst, to confess to
Stubmore--whose character I well know--that, oppressed by difficulties,
I had yielded to temptation, that I had forged his name (as I had forged
his father's) as an authority to sell the capital from the bank, and
that now, in replacing the money, I repaid my error and threw myself on
his indulgence, on his silence. I say that I know enough of the man to
know that I should be thus cheaply saved, or at the worst, I should have
but to strengthen his compassion by a bribe to his avarice; but if I
cannot replace the money, I am lost."

"Well, well," said Lucretia; "the money you shall have, let me but find
my son, and--"

"Grant me patience!" cried Varney, impetuously. "But what can your son
do, if found, unless you endow him with the heritage of Laughton? To do
that, Helen, who comes next to Percival St. John in the course of
the entail, must cease to live! Have I not aided, am I not aiding you
hourly, in your grand objects? This evening I shall see a man whom I
have long lost sight of, but who has acquired in a lawyer's life the
true scent after evidence: if that evidence exist, it shall be found. I
have just learned his address. By tomorrow he shall be on the track.
I have stinted myself to save from the results of the last forgery
the gold to whet his zeal. For the rest, as I have said, your design
involves the removal of two lives. Already over the one more difficult
to slay the shadow creeps and the pall hangs. I have won, as you wished,
and as was necessary, young St. John's familiar acquaintance; when the
hour comes, he is in my hands."

Lucretia smiled sternly. "So!" she said, between her ground teeth, "the
father forbade me the house that was my heritage! I have but to lift
a finger and breathe a word, and, desolate as I am, I thrust from
that home the son! The spoiler left me the world,--I leave his son the
grave!"

"But," said Varney, doggedly pursuing his dreadful object, "why force
me to repeat that his is not the only life between you and your son's
inheritance? St. John gone, Helen still remains. And what, if your
researches fail, are we to lose the rich harvest which Helen will yield
us,--a harvest you reap with the same sickle which gathers in your
revenge? Do you no longer see in Helen's face the features of her
mother? Is the perfidy of