"And I have done all this myself, without the voluntary help of any human being. I have used men as the mechanic uses tools, making them do his work, or as the potter uses clay, molding it to his purpose.
"Let him marry Emma Cavendish. I can part them at any moment afterward and throw them into a felon's prison, and cast her down from her proud place into misery and degradation.
"I could stop their marriage now, or at the altar. But I will not do that; for to do that would be only to disappoint or grieve them. But my vengeance must strike a deeper blow. It must degrade and ruin them. I will wait until they have been married some time. Then, in the hour of their fancied security, I will come down upon them like an avalanche of destruction."
In the feverish excitement of anticipating this fiendish consummation of her revenge she almost forgot her heinous crime, and ceased to be haunted by the hideous specter of her murdered lover.
It was on the fifteenth of the month, when she happened to take up the morning paper.
She turned first—as she always did—to the column containing notices of marriages and deaths.
And her face grew wild and white as she read:
Married.—On the morning of the 10th instant, at Blue Cliff Hall, Virginia, the seat of the bride, by the Rev. Dr. Beresford Jones, Mr. Alden Lytton, of Richmond, to Miss Emma Angela, only daughter of the late Charles Cavendish, Governor of Virginia.
She read no further that day. There were other marriages following this; but she felt no curiosity now about them. And there was a formidable row of death notices, headed by the obituary of Mrs. Cavendish, but she did not even see it.
The announcement of the marriage had taken her by surprise. She had not expected to see it for a month yet to come. And, as she did not observe the notice of Mrs. Cavendish's death, she could not understand why the marriage had been hastened by so many weeks.