She lifted her slender, white hands and regarded them fixedly.
"There is blood upon my hands," she said with an irrepressible shudder. "They look fair and white, but they have sent three human souls into the presence of their Creator. Pshaw! why do I pause to reflect here? Let me cover up the traces of my crime and go."
She took up the shovel, and opening the door of the stove, pulled out a quantity of blazing fire-brands and scattered them recklessly upon the bare floor, tossing one so close to the body of old Peter that his shock of red hair was ignited and burned with a disagreeable stench.
Mrs. Vance turned away with such a laugh as a fiend might have loved to hear, and hurried from the house, leaving the door, which she hastily unlocked, partly ajar.
"It does not matter," she thought to herself. "No one will discover them. The old shell of a house will ignite from the brands directly and burn down to the ground."
Drawing her veil tightly over her face she hurried away over the lonely road. About half a mile from the old house she met a man riding on horseback towards the route she was leaving. He scrutinized the solitary woman keenly, but could make nothing of her thickly shrouded features, and rode onward.
"Some wayfarer," she thought carelessly, and hurried on, eager to leave the hated vicinity of her double crime.