e where Beck had wearily halted.

The chaise stops; Varney pulls in, and draws aside to the hedgerow. Some
one within the vehicle is speaking to the fugitive! May it not be
St. John himself? To his rage and his terror, he sees Beck painfully
dismount from his horse, sees him totter to the door of the chaise, sees
a servant leap from the box and help him up the step, sees him enter. It
must be Percival on his return,--Percival, to whom he tells that story
of horror! Varney's brute-like courage forsook him; his heart was
appalled. In one of those panics so common with that boldness which
is but animal, his sole thought became that of escape. He turned his
horse's head to the fence, forced his way desperately through the
barrier, made into the wood, and sat there, cowering and listening, till
in another minute he heard the wheels rattle on, and the horses gallop
hard down the hill towards the park.

The autumn wind swept through the trees, it shook the branches of the
lofty ash that overhung the Accursed One. What observer of Nature knows
not that peculiar sound which the ash gives forth in the blast? Not
the solemn groan of the oak, not the hollow murmur of the beech, but
a shrill wail, a shriek as of a human voice in sharp anguish. Varney
shuddered, as if he had heard the death-cry of his intended victim.
Through briers and thickets, torn by the thorns, bruised by the boughs,
he plunged deeper and deeper into the wood, gained at length the main
path cut through it, found himself in a lane, and rode on, careless
whither, till he had reached a small town, about ten miles from
Laughton, where he resolved to wait till his nerves had recovered their
tone, and he could more calmly calculate the chances of safety.

CHAPTER XXVII. LUCRETIA REGAINS HER SON.

It seemed as if now, when danger became most imminent and present, that
that very danger served to restore to Lucretia Dalibard her faculties,
which during the earlier day had been steeped in a kind of dreary
stupor. The absolute necessity of playing out her execrable part with
all suitable and consistent hypocrisy, braced her into iron. But the
disguise she assumed was a supernatural effort, it stretched to cracking
every fibre of the brain; it seemed almost to herself as if, her object
once gained, either life or consciousness could hold out no more.

A chaise stopped at the porch; two gentlemen descended. The elder paused
irresolutely, and at length, taking out a