ad she lived in
Italy then, she had become a nun; for in this woman, unlike Varney and
Dalibard, the conscience could never be utterly silenced. In her choice
of evil, she found only torture to her spirit in all the respites
afforded to the occupations it indulged. When employed upon ill, remorse
gave way to the zest of scheming; when the ill was done, remorse came
with the repose.

It was in this peculiar period of her life that Lucretia, turning
everywhere, and desperately, for escape from the past, became acquainted
with some members of one of the most rigid of the sects of Dissent. At
first she permitted herself to know and commune with these persons
from a kind of contemptuous curiosity; she desired to encourage, in
contemplating them, her experience of the follies of human nature: but
in that crisis of her mind, in those struggles of her reason, whatever
showed that which she most yearned to discover,--namely, earnest
faith, rooted and genuine conviction, whether of annihilation or
of immortality, a philosophy that might reconcile her to crime by
destroying the providence of good, or a creed that could hold out the
hope of redeeming the past and exorcising sin by the mystery of a Divine
sacrifice,--had over her a power which she had not imagined or divined.
Gradually the intense convictions of her new associates disturbed and
infected her. Their affirmations that as we are born in wrath, so sin
is our second nature, our mysterious heritage, seemed, to her
understanding, willing to be blinded, to imply excuses for her past
misdeeds. Their assurances that the worst sinner may become the most
earnest saint; that through but one act of the will, resolute faith,
all redemption is to be found,--these affirmations and these assurances,
which have so often restored the guilty and remodelled the human heart,
made a salutary, if brief, impression upon her. Nor were the lives of
these Dissenters (for the most part austerely moral), nor the peace
and self-complacency which they evidently found in the satisfaction of
conscience and fulfilment of duty, without an influence over her that
for a while both chastened and soothed.

Hopeful of such a convert, the good teachers strove hard to confirm the
seeds springing up from the granite and amidst the weeds; and amongst
them came one man more eloquent, more seductive, than the rest,--Alfred
Braddell. This person, a trader at Liverpool, was one of those strange
living paradoxes th