William Mainwaring forgotten or forgiven?"

"Gabriel Varney," said Lucretia, in a hollow and tremulous voice, "when
in that hour in which my whole being was revulsed, and I heard the cord
snap from the anchor, and saw the demons of the storm gather round my
bark; when in that hour I stooped calmly down and kissed my rival's
brow,--I murmured an oath which seemed not inspired by my own soul, but
by an influence henceforth given to my fate: I vowed that the perfidy
dealt to me should be repaid; I vowed that the ruin of my own existence
should fall on the brow which I kissed. I vowed that if shame and
disgrace were to supply the inheritance I had forfeited, I would not
stand alone amidst the scorn of the pitiless world. In the vision of my
agony, I saw, afar, the altar dressed and the bride-chamber prepared;
and I breathed my curse, strong as prophecy, on the marriage-hearth and
the marriage-bed. Why dream, then, that I would rescue the loathed child
of that loathed union from your grasp? But is the time come? Yours may
be come: is mine?"

Something so awful there was in the look of his accomplice, so intense
in the hate of her low voice, that Varney, wretch as he was, and
contemplating at that very hour the foulest and most hideous guilt, drew
back, appalled.

Madame Dalibard resumed, and in a somewhat softer tone, but softened
only by the anguish of despair.

"Oh, had it been otherwise, what might I have been! Given over from that
hour to the very incarnation of plotting crime, none to resist the evil
impulse of my own maddening heart, the partner, forced on me by fate,
leading me deeper and deeper into the inextricable hell,--from that
hour fraud upon fraud, guilt upon guilt, infamy heaped on infamy, till
I stand a marvel to myself that the thunderbolt falls not, that Nature
thrusts not from her breast a living outrage on all her laws! Was I not
justified in the desire of retribution? Every step that I fell, every
glance that I gave to the gulf below, increased but in me the desire for
revenge. All my acts had flowed from one fount: should the stream roll
pollution, and the fount spring pure?"

"You have had your revenge on your rival and her husband."

"I had it, and I passed on!" said Lucretia, with nostrils dilated as
with haughty triumph; "they were crushed, and I suffered them to live!
Nay, when, by chance, I heard of William Mainwaring's death, I bowed
down my head, and I almost think I wept. The old days c