"But," she said at last, "you have persuaded St. John to give this man
the meeting in London,--to put off his visit for the time. St. John will
return to us to-morrow. Well, and if he finds his Helen is no more! Two
nights ago I, for the first time, mingled in the morning draught that
which has no antidote and no cure. This night two drops more, and St.
John will return to find that Death is in the house before him. And
then for himself,--the sole remaining barrier between my son and this
inheritance,--for himself, why, grief sometimes kills suddenly; and
there be drugs whose effect simulates the death-stroke of grief."

"Yet, yet, this rapidity, if necessary, is perilous. Nothing in Helen's
state forbodes sudden death by natural means. The strangeness of two
deaths, both so young; Greville in England, if not here,--hastening down
to examine, to inquire. With such prepossessions against you, there must
be an inquest."

"Well, and what can be discovered? It was I who shrank before,--it is
I who now urge despatch. I feel as in my proper home in these halls. I
would not leave them again but to my grave. I stand on the hearth of my
youth; I fight for my rights and my son's! Perish those who oppose me!"

A fell energy and power were in the aspect of the murderess as she thus
spoke; and while her determination awed the inferior villany of Varney,
it served somewhat to mitigate his fears.

As in more detail they began to arrange their execrable plans, Percival,
while the horses were being harnessed to take him to the nearest
post-town, sought Helen, and found her in the little chamber which
he had described and appropriated as her own, when his fond fancy had
sketched the fair outline of the future.

This room had been originally fitted up for the private devotions of the
Roman Catholic wife of an ancestor in the reign of Charles II; and in
a recess, half veiled by a curtain, there still stood that holy symbol
which, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, no one sincerely penetrated
with the solemn pathos of sacred history can behold unmoved,--the Cross
of the Divine Agony. Before this holy symbol Helen stood in earnest
reverence. She did not kneel (for the forms of the religion in which
she had been reared were opposed to that posture of worship before the
graven image), but you could see in that countenance, eloquent at once
with the enthusiasm and the meekness of piety, that the soul was filled
with the memories and th