rning
eye-ball, and stole slowly down her cheek; it relieved her pain. She
pressed Cadurcis hand, and speaking in a hollow voice, and with a look
vague and painful, she said, 'I am a victim, but I am resolved. I
never will desert her who devoted herself to me.'

Cadurcis quitted her hand rather abruptly, and began walking up and
down on the turf that surrounded the fountain.

'Devoted herself to you!' he exclaimed with a fiendish laugh, and
speaking, as was his custom, between his teeth. 'Commend me to such
devotion. Not content with depriving you of a father, now forsooth
she must bereave you of a lover too! And this is a mother, a devoted
mother! The cold-blooded, sullen, selfish, inexorable tyrant!'

'Plantagenet!' exclaimed Venetia with great animation.

'Nay, I will speak. Victim, indeed! You have ever been her slave. She
a devoted mother! Ay! as devoted as a mother as she was dutiful as a
wife! She has no heart; she never had a feeling. And she cajoles you
with her love, her devotion, the stern hypocrite!'

'I must leave you,' said Venetia; 'I cannot bear this.'

'Oh! the truth, the truth is precious,' said Cadurcis, taking her
hand, and preventing her from moving. 'Your mother, your devoted
mother, has driven one man of genius from her bosom, and his country.
Yet there is another. Deny me what I ask, and to-morrow's sun shall
light me to another land; to this I will never return; I will blend
my tears with your father's, and I will publish to Europe the double
infamy of your mother. I swear it solemnly. Still I stand here,
Venetia; prepared, if you will but smile upon me, to be her son, her
dutiful son. Nay! her slave like you. She shall not murmur. I will be
dutiful; she shall be devoted; we will all be happy,' he added in a
softer tone. 'Now, now, Venetia, my happiness is on the stake, now,
now.'

'I have spoken,' said Venetia. 'My heart may break, but my purpose
shall not falter.'

'Then my curse upon your mother's head?' said Cadurcis, with terrible
vehemency. 'May heaven rain all its plagues upon her, the Hecate!'

'I will listen no more,' exclaimed Venetia indignantly, and she moved
away. She had proceeded some little distance when she paused and
looked back; Cadurcis was still at the fountain, but he did not
observe her. She remembered his sudden departure from Cherbury; she
did not doubt that, in the present instance, he would leave them as
abruptly, and that he would keep his word so solemnly