f.
"After he had ruined me, as the girls say, he told me as how it was all
sham!"

"You loved him, then?"

"The man was well enough, ma'am, and he behaved handsome and got me a
husband. I've known better days."

"You sleep well at night?"

"Yes, ma'am, thank you; I loves my bed."

"I have done with you," said Madame Dalibard, stifling a groan, as
now, placed in her bed, she turned to the wall. Martha extinguished the
candle, leaving it on the table by the bed, with a book and a box of
matches, for Madame Dalibard was a bad sleeper, and often read in the
night. She then drew the curtains and went her way.

It might be an hour after Martha had retired to rest that a hand was
stretched from the bed, that the candle was lighted, and Lucretia
Dalibard rose; with a sudden movement she threw aside the coverings, and
stood in her long night-gear on the floor. Yes, the helpless, paralyzed
cripple rose, was on her feet,--tall, elastic, erect! It was as a
resuscitation from the grave. Never was change more startling than that
simple action effected,--not in the form alone, but the whole character
of the face. The solitary light streamed upward on a countenance on
every line of which spoke sinister power and strong resolve. If you
had ever seen her before in her false, crippled state, prostrate and
helpless, and could have seen her then,--those eyes, if haggard still,
now full of life and vigour; that frame, if spare, towering aloft in
commanding stature, perfect in its proportions as a Grecian image of
Nemesis,--your amaze would have merged into terror, so preternatural did
the transformation appear, so did aspect and bearing contradict the very
character of her sex, uniting the two elements most formidable in man or
in fiend,--wickedness and power.

She stood a moment motionless, breathing loud, as if it were a joy to
breathe free from restraint; and then, lifting the light, and gliding to
the adjoining room, she unlocked a bureau in the corner, and bent over a
small casket, which she opened with a secret spring.

Reader, cast back your eye to that passage in this history when Lucretia
Clavering took down the volume from the niche in the tapestried chamber
at Laughton, and numbered, in thought, the hours left to her uncle's
life. Look back on the ungrateful thought; behold how it has swelled
and ripened into the guilty deed! There, in that box, Death guards his
treasure crypt. There, all the science of Hades numbers its