ntouched, that it was examined by the surgeon, that the fell admixture
could be detected, suspicion would wander anywhere rather than to that
crippled and helpless kinswoman who could not rise from her bed without
aid.

But now this patience was to be abandoned, the folds of the serpent were
to coil in one fell clasp upon its prey.

Fiend as Lucretia had become, and hardened as were all her resolves
by the discovery of her son, and her impatience to endow him with her
forfeited inheritance, she yet shrank from the face of Helen that day;
on the excuse of illness, she kept her room, and admitted only
Varney, who stole in from time to time, with creeping step and haggard
countenance, to sustain her courage or his own. And every time he
entered, he found Lucretia sitting with Walter Ardworth's open letter in
her hand, and turning with a preternatural excitement that seemed
almost like aberration of mind, from the grim and horrid topic which
he invited, to thoughts of wealth and power and triumph and exulting
prophecies of the fame her son should achieve. He looked but on the
blackness of the gulf, and shuddered; her vision overleaped it, and
smiled on the misty palaces her fancy built beyond.

Late in the evening, before she retired to rest, Helen knocked gently at
her aunt's door. A voice, quick and startled, bade her enter; she came
in, with her sweet, caressing look, and took Lucretia's hand, which
struggled from the clasp. Bending over that haggard brow, she said
simply, yet to Lucretia's ear the voice seemed that of command, "Let
me kiss you this night!" and her lips pressed that brow. The murderess
shuddered, and closed her eyes; when she opened them, the angel visitor
was gone.

Night deepened and deepened into those hours from the first of which
we number the morn, though night still is at her full. Moonbeam and
starbeam came through the casements shyly and fairylike as on that
night when the murderess was young and crimeless, in deed, if not in
thought,--that night when, in the book of Leechcraft, she meted out the
hours in which the life of her benefactor might still interpose between
her passion and its end. Along the stairs, through the hall, marched the
armies of light, noiseless and still and clear as the judgments of
God amidst the darkness and shadow of mortal destinies. In one chamber
alone, the folds, curtained close, forbade all but a single ray; that
ray came direct as the stream from a lantern; as