d, was hurled into night and chaos.
Manacled and bound, for at times her paroxysms were terrible, and all
partook of the destructive and murderous character which her faculties,
when present, had betrayed, she was placed in the vehicle by the
shrinking side of her accomplice.

Long before he arrived in London, Varney had got rid of his fearful
companion. His chaise had stopped at the iron gates of a large building
somewhat out of the main road, and the doors of the madhouse closed on
Lucretia Dalibard.

Varney then hastened to Dover, with intention of flight into France; he
was just about to step into the vessel, when he was tapped rudely on the
shoulder, and a determined voice said, "Mr. Gabriel Varney, you are my
prisoner!"

"For what? Some paltry debt?" said Varney, haughtily.

"For forgery on the Bank of England!"

Varney's hand plunged into his vest. The officer seized it in time, and
wrested the blade from his grasp. Once arrested for an offence it
was impossible to disprove, although the very smallest of which his
conscience might charge him, Varney sank into the blackest despair.
Though he had often boasted, not only to others, but to his own vain
breast, of the easy courage with which, when life ceased to yield
enjoyment, he could dismiss it by the act of his own will; though he had
possessed himself of Lucretia's murderous ring, and death, if fearful,
was therefore at his command,--self-destruction was the last thought
that occurred to him; that morbid excitability of fancy which, whether
in his art or in his deeds, had led him to strange delight in horror,
now served but to haunt him with the images of death in those ghastliest
shapes familiar to them who look only into the bottom of the charnel,
and see but the rat and the worm and the loathsome agencies of
corruption. It was not the despair of conscience that seized him, it was
the abject clinging to life; not the remorse of the soul,--that still
slept within him, too noble an agency for one so debased,--but the
gross physical terror. As the fear of the tiger, once aroused, is more
paralyzing than that of the deer, proportioned to the savageness of a
disposition to which fear is a novelty, so the very boldness of Varney,
coming only from the perfection of the nervous organization, and
unsupported by one moral sentiment, once struck down, was corrupted into
the vilest cowardice. With his audacity, his shrewdness forsook him.
Advised by his lawyer to pl