nce it must be, since my
son requires the sacrifice, do as you will with the victim that death
mercifully snatches from my grasp. I could have wished to prolong her
life, to load it with some fragment of the curse her parents heaped upon
me,--baffled love, and ruin, and despair! I could have hoped, in this
division of the spoil, that mine had been the vengeance, if yours the
gold. You want the life, I the heart,--the heart to torture first; and
then--why then more willingly than I do now, could I have thrown the
carcass to the jackal!"

"Listen!" began Varney; when the door opened and Helen herself stood
unconsciously smiling at the threshold.

CHAPTER VI. THE LAWYER AND THE BODY-SNATCHER.

That same evening Beck, according to appointment, met Percival and
showed him the dreary-looking house which held the fair stranger who had
so attracted his youthful fancy. And Percival looked at the high walls
with the sailor's bold desire for adventure, while confused visions
reflected from plays, operas, and novels, in which scaling walls with
rope-ladders and dark-lanterns was represented as the natural vocation
of a lover, flitted across his brain; and certainly he gave a deep sigh
as his common-sense plucked him back from such romance. However, having
now ascertained the house, it would be easy to learn the name of its
inmates, and to watch or make his opportunity. As slowly and reluctantly
he walked back to the spot where he had left his cabriolet, he entered
into some desultory conversation with his strange guide; and the pity
he had before conceived for Beck increased upon him as he talked and
listened. This benighted mind, only illumined by a kind of miserable
astuteness and that "cunning of the belly" which is born of want to
engender avarice; this joyless temperament; this age in youth; this
living reproach, rising up from the stones of London against our social
indifference to the souls which wither and rot under the hard eyes
of science and the deaf ears of wealth,--had a pathos for his lively
sympathies and his fresh heart.

"If ever you want a friend, come to me," said St. John, abruptly.

The sweeper stared, and a gleam of diviner nature, a ray of gratitude
and unselfish devotion, darted through the fog and darkness of his mind.
He stood, with his hat off, watching the wheels of the cabriolet as it
bore away the happy child of fortune, and then, shaking his head, as at
some puzzle that perplexed and defied