TS VANISH WITHIN THE URN.

Varney's self-commune restored to him his constitutional audacity. He
returned to Laughton towards the evening, and held a long conference
with Greville. Fortunately for him, perhaps, and happily for all, Helen
had lost all more dangerous symptoms; and the physician, who was in
the house, saw in her state nothing not easily to be accounted for by
natural causes. Percival had arrived, had seen Helen,--no wonder she
was better! Both from him and from Helen, Madame Dalibard's fearful
condition was for the present concealed. Ardworth's story, and the fact
of Beck's identity with Vincent Braddell, were also reserved for a later
occasion. The tale which Beck had poured into the ear of Greville (when,
recognizing the St. John livery, the captain stopped his chaise to
inquire if Percival were at the Hall, and when thrilled by the hideous
import of his broken reply, that gentleman had caused him to enter the
vehicle to explain himself further), Varney, with his wonted art and
address, contrived to strip of all probable semblance. Evidently the
poor lad had been already delirious; his story must be deemed the
nightmare of his disordered reason. Varney insisted upon surgical
examination as to the cause of his death. The membranes of the
brain were found surcharged with blood, as in cases of great mental
excitement; the slight puncture in the wrist, ascribed to the prick of
a rusty nail, provoked no suspicion. If some doubts remained still in
Greville's acute mind, he was not eager to express, still less to
act upon them. Helen was declared to be out of danger; Percival was
safe,--why affix by minute inquiry into the alleged guilt of Madame
Dalibard (already so awfully affected by the death of her son and by the
loss of her reason) so foul a stain on the honoured family of St. John?
But Greville was naturally anxious to free the house as soon as possible
both of Varney and that ominous Lucretia, whose sojourn under its roof
seemed accursed. He therefore readily assented when Varney proposed, as
his obvious and personal duty, to take charge of his mother-in-law, and
remove her to London for immediate advice.

At the dead of the black-clouded night, no moon and no stars, the son
of Olivier Dalibard bore away the form of the once-formidable
Lucretia,--the form, for the mind was gone; that teeming, restless,
and fertile intellect, which had carried along the projects with the
preterhuman energies of the fien