now. Will you help me or not?"

"Help you!" cried Gualtier, bitterly, "help you! to what? to do that
which will destroy my last hope--and after I have extorted from you
your promise! Ask me any thing else."

"I want nothing else."

"You may yet want my aid."

"If you do not help me now, I shall never want you."

"You have needed me before, and will need me again."

"If _he_ dies, I shall never need you again."

"If _he_ dies, that is the very time when you will need me."

"No, I shall not--for if _he_ dies I will die myself!" cried Hilda,
in a burst of uncontrollable passion.

Gualtier started, and his heart sank within him. Long and earnestly
he looked at her, but he saw that this was more than a fitful
outburst of passion. Looking on her face with its stern and fixed
resolve, with its intense meaning, he knew that what she had said was
none other than her calm, set purpose. He saw it in every one of
those faded lineaments, upon which such a change had been wrought in
so short a time. He read it in the hollows round her eyes, in her
sunken cheeks, in her white, bloodless lips, in her thin, emaciated
hands, which were now clenched in desperate resolve. From this he saw
that there was no appeal. He learned how strong that passion must be
which had thus overmastered her, and was consuming all the energies
of her powerful nature. To this she was sacrificing the labor of
years, and all the prospects which now lay before her; to this she
gave up all her future life, with all its possibilities of wealth and
honor and station. A coronet, a castle, a princely revenue, rank,
wealth, and title, all lay before her within her grasp; yet now she
turned her back upon them, and came to the bedside of the man whose
death was necessary to her success, to save him from death. She
trampled her own interests in the dust; she threw to the winds the
hard-won results of treachery and crime, and only that she might be
near him who abhorred her, and whose first word on coming back to
consciousness might be an imprecation. Beside this man who hated her,
he who adored her was as nothing, and all his devotion and all his
adoration were in one moment forgotten.

All these thoughts flashed through the mind of Gualtier as at that
instant he comprehended the situation. And what was he to do? Could
he associate himself with her in this new purpose? He could not. He
might have refrained from the work of death at the outset, if she had
bid