Visions came to her in the long, sultry night—so close and hot in the stifling little chamber that she could not rest—of how different life might have been if only the wealth that had become only a tradition in the family now had not been so strangely lost.
“I should be his equal now. No one would try to part us, and—we should be so happy!” she sobbed; and the bitter, bitter tears came in a burning shower.
She buried her hot face in the pillow, shuddering, for a wild temptation had come to her—one from which she shrunk in terror.
She murmured, faintly:
“It is a terrible risk; but what matter? Life is not so sweet that one should greatly prize it, even if goaded to throw it away!”
But she hid her face in her hands, and her slight frame shook as with a mortal chill.
A vision had swept over her of the day when she had found her beautiful mother cold and dead—dead by her own hand—and how she, a weeping child, had been taken to the hearts of the good, kind old couple who had loved her so dearly.
“If I died, there would be none to weep for me—none but dear Mrs. Banks,” she thought, piteously; and the terrible temptation to risk life for the sake of sordid gold overpowered the poor girl who had never realized till now the worldly value of the hard, yellow, shining metal.
A yearning to be rich and grand like the Beresfords, to meet them on equal grounds, to give them scorn for scorn, to flaunt before their eyes the devotion of other lovers, overpowered the unhappy girl, who knew that there was one chance in a hundred of realizing these radiant dreams—one chance which she vowed to strive for despite the grim records of sixty years of her ill-fated race.
It was August now, and ten years had passed since a victim had been immolated on the grim altar of the Moloch of Suicide Place. Would it claim another sacrifice, this insatiable monster? But a few months of the fatal year remained.