“I will never doubt you again! I was a wretch to have doubted you then! Dear one, I have been so occupied with my own selfish jealousy, that I have not even inquired—how have you been during the months of my long absence?”
“Just as always. Life passes with me in such monotony, that the changes of the weather are all that I know.”
“While others, your nearest neighbors, have experienced such fearful vicissitudes of fortune that their daily lives have passed more like the successive acts in some dark tragedy, than scenes in a real existence! My uncle’s family at Allworth Abbey! Oh, heaven, Alma! what a fatality was there! The whole family swept from the face of the earth in a few short months!”
“Alas, yes; Oh, Norham, you must know how deeply I sympathize with you in this great sorrow! I should have said so before, but your own personal trouble engaged all my attention.”
“My abominable jealousy, you should say; but let that pass. Alma, I was not as intimate as my brother Malcolm was with my uncle’s family; and if they had all gone off in a natural way, by a visitation of Providence, as it is called, I should not have grieved more for them than men usually grieve for uncles, aunts and cousins. But to think that they should have been destroyed by a fiend in the shape of a girl—” said Norham, shuddering.
“Ah! to whom do you refer?” inquired Alma.
“To whom, but to that serpent whom they warmed at their hearth-stone until she had life enough to sting them to death! To whom but to that Indian cobra, Eudora Leaton? Eudora Leaton, a name destined to become notorious with those of Borgia, Brinvilliers and Lafarge!”
“You feel certain of her guilt, then?”
“Certain? Yes! Would it were not so! would that there were a rational doubt of it! For if there were I should dare to hope that, though the old House should become extinct, it need not die in blood and shame!” said Norham Montrose, bitterly.
“Then why not entertain that hope! There is nothing but circumstantial evidence against Eudora Leaton, and such evidence is proverbially fallacious.”