d now you will not see me again till
all is over either with _him_ or with _me_."

He bowed respectfully and departed. After he had left, Hilda sat
looking at the door with a face of rage and malignant fury. At
length, starting to her feet, she hurried up to her room.

CHAPTER XLVII.

HILDA SEES A GULF BENEATH HER FEET.

The astonishing change in Gualtier was an overwhelming shock to
Hilda. She had committed the fatal mistake of underrating him, and of
putting herself completely in his power. She had counted on his being
always humble and docile, always subservient and blindly obedient.
She had put from her all thoughts of a possible day of reckoning. She
had fostered his devotion to her so as to be used for her own ends,
and now found that she had raised up a power which might sweep her
away. In the first assertion of that power she had been vanquished,
and compelled to make a promise which she had at first refused with
the haughtiest contempt. She could only take refuge in vague plans of
evading her promise, and in punishing Gualtier for what seemed to her
his unparalleled audacity.

Yet, after all, bitter as the humiliation had been, it did not lessen
her fervid passion for Lord Chetwynde, and the hate and the vengeance
that had arisen when that passion had been condemned. After the first
shock of the affair with Gualtier had passed, her madness and fury
against him passed also, and her wild spirit was once again filled
with the all-engrossing thought of Lord Chetwynde. Gualtier had gone
off, as he said, and she was to see him no more for some
time--perhaps never. He had his own plans and purposes, of the
details of which Hilda knew nothing, but could only conjecture. She
felt that failure on his part was not probable, and gradually, so
confident was she that he would succeed, Lord Chetwynde began to seem
to her not merely a doomed man, but a man who had already undergone
his doom. And now another change came over her--that change which
Death can make in the heart of the most implacable of men when his
enemy has left life forever. From the pangs of wounded love she had
sought refuge in vengeance--but the prospect of a gratified vengeance
was but a poor compensation for the loss of the hope of a requited
love. The tenderness of love still remained, and it struggled with
the ferocity of vengeance. That love pleaded powerfully for Lord
Chetwynde's life. Hope came also, to lend its assistance to the
argu