fably more fierce
and intolerable was the wrath that seized her when, in her haunted
imagination, she saw all Susan's rapture at the vows of Mainwaring
mantling in Helen's face! All that might have disarmed a heart as hard,
but less diseased, less preoccupied by revenge, only irritated more the
consuming hate of that inexorable spirit. Helen's seraphic purity,
her exquisite, overflowing kindness, ever forgetting self, her airy
cheerfulness, even her very moods of melancholy, calm and seemingly
causeless as they were, perpetually galled and blistered that writhing,
preternatural susceptibility which is formed by the consciousness of
infamy, the dreary egotism of one cut off from the charities of the
world, with whom all mirth is sardonic convulsion, all sadness rayless
and unresigned despair.

Of the two, Percival inspired her with feelings the most akin to
humanity. For him, despite her bitter memories of his father, she felt
something of compassion, and shrank from the touch of his frank hand in
remorse. She had often need to whisper to herself that his life was an
obstacle to the heritage of the son of whom, as we have seen, she was
in search, and whom, indeed, she believed she had already found in John
Ardworth; that it was not in wrath and in vengeance that this victim
was to be swept into the grave, but as an indispensable sacrifice to a
cherished object, a determined policy. As, in the studies of her youth,
she had adopted the Machiavelism of ancient State-craft as a rule
admissible in private life, so she seemed scarcely to admit as a crime
that which was but the removal of a barrier between her aim and her
end. Before she had become personally acquainted with Percival she had
rejected all occasion to know him. She had suffered Varney to call upon
him as the old protege of Sir Miles, and to wind into his intimacy,
meaning to leave to her accomplice, when the hour should arrive, the
dread task of destruction. This not from cowardice, for Gabriel had once
rightly described her when he said that if she lived with shadows she
could quell them, but simply because, more intellectually unsparing
than constitutionally cruel (save where the old vindictive memories
thoroughly unsexed her), this was a victim whose pangs she desired not
to witness, over whose fate it was no luxury to gloat and revel. She
wished not to see nor to know him living, only to learn that he was no
more, and that Helen alone stood between Laughton a