of stately calm which is
the character of those old mansion-houses, which owner after owner has
loved and heeded, leaving to them the graces of antiquity, guarding them
from the desolation of decay.

Alone sat Lucretia under the cedar-trees, and her heart made dismal
contrast to the noble tranquillity that breathed around. From whatever
softening or repentant emotions which the scene of her youth might first
have awakened; from whatever of less unholy anguish which memory might
have caused when she first, once more, sat under those remembered
boughs, and, as a voice from a former world, some faint whisper of
youthful love sighed across the waste and ashes of her devastated
soul,--from all such rekindled humanities in the past she had now, with
gloomy power, wrenched herself away. Crime such as hers admits not long
the sentiment that softens remorse of gentler error. If there wakes one
moment from the past the warning and melancholy ghost, soon from that
abyss rises the Fury with the lifted scourge, and hunts on the frantic
footsteps towards the future. In the future, the haggard intellect of
crime must live, must involve itself mechanically in webs and meshes,
and lose past and present in the welcome atmosphere of darkness.

Thus while Lucretia sat, and her eyes rested upon the halls of her
youth, her mind overleaped the gulf that yet yawned between her and
the object on which she was bent. Already, in fancy, that home was hers
again, its present possessor swept away, the interloping race of Vernon
ending in one of those abrupt lines familiar to genealogists, which
branch out busily from the main tree, as if all pith and sap were
monopolized by them, continue for a single generation, and then shrink
into a printer's bracket with the formal laconism, "Died without
issue." Back, then, in the pedigree would turn the eye of some curious
descendant, and see the race continue in the posterity of Lucretia
Clavering.

With all her ineffable vices, mere cupidity had not, as we have often
seen, been a main characteristic of this fearful woman; and in her
design to endow, by the most determined guilt, her son with the heritage
of her ancestors, she had hitherto looked but little to mere mercenary
advantages for herself: but now, in the sight of that venerable and
broad domain, a covetousness, absolute in itself, broke forth. Could
she have gained it for her own use rather than her son's, she would have
felt a greater zest in h