s my son? You say he is within these walls. Call him forth to
protect his mother! Give me at least my son,--my son!"

Her last words were drowned by a fresh burst of fury from her denouncer.
In all the coarsest invective his education could supply, in all
the hideous vulgarities of his untutored dialect, in that uncurbed
licentiousness of tone, look, and manner which passion, once aroused,
gives to the dregs and scum of the populace, Beck poured forth his
frightful charges, his frantic execrations. In vain Captain Greville
strove to check him; in vain Walter Ardworth sought to draw him from
the room. But while the poor wretch--maddening not more with the
consciousness of the crime than with the excitement of the poison in
his blood--thus raved and stormed, a terrible suspicion crossed Walter
Ardworth; mechanically,--as his grasp was on the accuser's arm,--he
bared the sleeve, and on the wrist were the dark-blue letters burned
into the skin and bearing witness to his identity with the lost Vincent
Braddell.

"Hold, hold!" he exclaimed then; "hold, unhappy man!--it is your mother
whom you denounce!"

Lucretia sprang up erect; her eyes seemed starting from her head. She
caught at the arm pointed towards her in wrath and menace, and there,
amidst those letters that proclaimed her son, was the small puncture,
surrounded by a livid circle, that announced her victim. In the same
instant she discovered her child in the man who was calling down upon
her head the hatred of Earth and the justice of Heaven, and knew herself
his murderess!

She dropped the arm, and sank back on the chair; and whether the poison
had now reached to the vitals, or whether so unwonted a passion in so
frail a frame sufficed for the death-stroke, Beck himself, with a low,
suffocated cry, slid from the hand of Ardworth, and tottering a step
or so, the blood gushed from his mouth over Lucretia's robe; his head
drooped an instant, and, falling, rested first upon her lap, then struck
heavily upon the floor. The two men bent over him and raised him in
their arms; his eyes opened and closed, his throat rattled, and as he
fell back into their arms a corpse, a laugh rose close at hand,--it rang
through the walls, it was heard near and afar, above and below; not an
ear in that house that heard it not. In that laugh fled forever, till
the Judgment-day, from the blackened ruins of her lost soul, the reason
of the murderess-mother.

CHAPTER XXVIII. THE LO