"Heavens! have you found another object whereon to wreak your vengeance?" exclaimed Adeline. "Then may God have mercy upon the unhappy man!"
"Yes—pray for him, Adeline: he will have need of all your sympathy!"
With these words Lydia Hutchinson left the boudoir.
It was now nine o'clock in the evening: Mr. Graham had been left to dine alone; and Adeline felt the necessity of proceeding to the drawing-room, to join her guest in partaking of coffee.
A plea of indisposition was offered for her absence from the dinner-table; and to her questions concerning his patient, Mr. Graham replied favourably.
The evening dragged its slow length wearily along; for Adeline was too much depressed in spirits to prove a very agreeable companion. She moreover fancied she beheld an impudent leer upon the countenances of the domestics who served the coffee; and this circumstance, although in reality imaginary, only tended to complete her confusion and paralyse her powers of conversation.
Were it not that she now dreamt of vengeance in her turn,—were it not that she beheld a chance of speedily ridding herself for ever of the torturess whom circumstances had inflicted upon her,—she could not possibly have endured the weight of the last indignity forced upon her.
To be made the object, as she deemed herself to be, of her very servants' scandalous talk and insulting looks, was a position so utterly debasing, that she would have fled from it by means of suicide, had she not consoled herself by the idea that a terrible vengeance on the authoress of her degradation was within her reach.
Crime is like an object of terror seen dimly through the obscurity of night. When afar off from it, the appearance of that object is so vaguely horrible—so shapelessly appalling, that it makes the hair stand on end; but the more the eye contemplates it—the more familiar the beholder grows with its aspect—and the nearer he advances towards it, the less terrible does it become; until at length, when he goes close up to it, and touches it, he wonders that he was ever so weak as to be alarmed by it.
We have seen Lady Ravensworth recoiling with horror from the bare idea of perpetrating the crime which the possession of the self-vaunted bravo's address suggested to her imagination:—the next time it entered her thoughts, she was less terrified;—a few hours passed—and she was now pondering calmly and coldly upon the subject.