nd her son. Now that
he had himself, as if with predestined feet, crossed her threshold, that
he, like Helen, had delivered himself into her toils, the hideous guilt,
before removed from her hands, became haunting, fronted her face to
face, and filled her with a superstitious awe.

Meanwhile, her outward manner to both her meditated victims, if moody
and fitful at times, was not such as would have provoked suspicion even
in less credulous hearts. From the first entry of Helen under her roof
she had been formal and measured in her welcome,--kept her, as it were,
aloof, and affected no prodigal superfluity of dissimulation; but she
had never been positively harsh or unkind in word or in deed, and had
coldly excused herself for the repulsiveness of her manner.

"I am irritable," she said, "from long suffering, I am unsocial from
habitual solitude; do not expect from me the fondness and warmth that
should belong to our relationship. Do not harass yourself with vain
solicitude for one whom all seeming attention but reminds more painfully
of infirmity, and who, even thus stricken down, would be independent
of all cares not bought and paid for. Be satisfied to live here in all
reasonable liberty, to follow your own habits and caprices uncontrolled.
Regard me but as a piece of necessary furniture. You can never displease
me but when you notice that I live and suffer."

If Helen wept bitterly at these hard words when first spoken, it was not
with anger that her loving heart was so thrown back upon herself. On the
contrary, she became inspired with a compassion so great that it
took the character of reverence. She regarded this very coldness as a
mournful dignity. She felt grateful that one who could thus dispense
with, should yet have sought her. She had heard her mother say that
she had been under great obligations to Lucretia; and now, when she
was forbidden to repay them even by a kiss on those weary eyelids, a
daughter's hand to that sleepless pillow; when she saw that the barrier
first imposed was irremovable, that no time diminished the distance
her aunt set between them, that the least approach to the tenderness of
service beyond the most casual offices really seemed but to fret those
excitable nerves, and fever the hand that she ventured timorously to
clasp,--she retreated into herself with a sad amaze that increased her
pity and heightened her respect. To her, love seemed so necessary a
thing in the helplessness of hu