Crestfallen and humiliated she felt the danger of her position. She felt also its degradation, for this was the first time she had been in prison; but, worse than all, she was fearful of being baulked of that revenge for which she had so long and so patiently waited, and of which she believed herself secure.
Alf Purvis was at large, and she was in “durance vile.”
“Oh,” she ejaculated, “it is indeed bitter to be locked up here when all was working so well without. I must have been mad to run any risk—worse than mad—seeing that there was no earthly need for it.”
She screamed with rage, and climbing up to the window like a cat, she shook the bars with her white hands till the dust flew from the stones.
Uttering frightful imprecations she sank back exhausted.
“This is the worst of folly,” she ejaculated; “I cannot escape with my hands and arms. I must use a woman’s real weapons—her voice, her beauty, her falsehoods, with a man’s mind and nerve to guide them.”
She sat down, and, leaning her head against the wall, with her arms folded and her face slightly upturned, she began to reflect—as a mathematician commences the solution of some abstruse problem—as an actress studies the looks and gestures of a new and difficult part.
Man forgets and forgives, but the woman whose pride has been injured can never forget and will never forgive. Alf Purvis had cruelly wounded her vanity, and this vanity, which when flattered will decoy women into vice, when angered will drive them into crime.
Laura Stanbridge had taken a tigress-like fancy for this man, who was so much younger than herself, and whom she had taught to steal. She had spent pains and money upon him, believing that thus she would secure a powerful weapon; but it had proved a weapon with a sharp edge which stabbed the hand that endeavoured to direct it.
Spurned in her passions, thwarted in her schemes, she had conceived an incredible hatred against him.