“Oh, sir!” she exclaimed, as she rose, her bosom heaving and her face stirring with emotion. “Oh, sir, you have saved me. I began to read this book, not because you asked me, but because I was dull; but soon the words began to steal into my heart. I read on and on, unable to withdraw my eyes away. When the light was put out I screamed. In the horrible darkness and silence of the night I heard whispers all around me, and sounds like the rustling of wings in the air, and the words which I had read I read again in strokes of fire on the wall.
“I awoke in the morning with a burning head, and a cold shivering in all my limbs. Again I opened the book, almost fearing to read, and yet unable to resist the strange fascination which it exercised over me. Accept my most heartfelt thanks—you have saved me!”
She burst into tears as she spoke, and uttered words which were stifled with sobs; but all the while she was watching him like a lynx. She saw his hands clasp and his lips flutter for an instant; she understood that he believed in her sincerity, and gave a smile behind her hands—so cold, so sardonic, that it would have served as an offering to the demon who inspired her.
He stayed with her for a longer period than his usual wont. In that time he discovered that she possessed the power of diving through the dead and inanimate letter, and revealing the pearls of the spirit which were beyond the reach of common understandings.
In fact, she was a wonderful woman, for in two hours she taught him not only a lesson in theology, but she had completely studied his character and was learning it by heart.
“Ah,” murmured Laura Stanbridge to herself after he had departed, “he is the most virtuous man I ever met with. But so much the better; virtue is simplicity, simplicity leads to concession, concession to vice. That is why many good women fall and are scouted as ruiners, and why artful women, shielding themselves with prudence—the only useful virtue—are respected as moral members of society.”
As she lay in her bed that night, she murmured to herself in a state of satisfaction and full confidence in her diabolical machinations—
“He has two flaws in his armour—the one is ambition—laudable in its way—but in all ambitions there is a stamp of the cloven foot. The other is a blind and senseless bigotry upon a certain point. Through one of these I will stab him in the head, and through the other in the heart.”
For five days she allowed him to visit her without taking any fresh steps.
Precipitation would be her ruin, and she was too wary to risk taking any false step.