"O Hermione, Hermione! so beautiful and so unhappy!"

"A momentary instinct, which she is expiating fearfully. No wonder she does not leave the house. No wonder that her face looks like a tragic mask."

"No one seems to have suspected her guilt, or even his. We have never heard any whispers about poison."

"Dudgeon is a conceited fool. Having once said overwork, he would stick to overwork. Besides that poison is very subtle; I would have difficulty in detecting its workings myself."

"And this is the tragedy of that home! Oh, how much worse, how much more fearful than any I have attributed to it!"

The Doctor sighed.

"What has not Emma had to bear," he said.

"Emma!" Frank unconsciously roused himself. "If I remember rightly, Hermione has said that Emma did not know all her trouble."

"Thank G.o.d! May she never be enlightened."

"Edgar," whispered Frank, "I do not think I can let you read all that letter, though it tells much you ought to know. I have yet some consideration--for--for Hermione--" (How hard the word came from lips which once uttered it with so much pride!)--"and she never expected any other eyes than mine to rest upon these revelations of her heart of hearts. But one thing I must tell you in justice to yourself and the girl upon whom no shadow rests but that of a most loyal devotion to a most wretched sister. Not from her heart did the refusal come which blighted your hopes and made you cynical towards women. There were reasons she could not communicate, reasons she could not even dwell upon herself, why she felt forced to dismiss you, and in the seemingly heartless way she did."

"I am willing to believe it," said Edgar.

"Emma is a pure and beautiful spirit," observed Frank, and gave himself up to grief for her who was not, and yet who commanded his pity for her sufferings and possibly for her provocations.

Edgar now had enough of his own to think of, and if Frank had been less absorbed in his own trouble he might have observed with what longing eyes his friend turned every now and then towards the sheets which contained so much of Emma's history as well as her sister's. Finally he spoke:

"Why does Emma remain in the house to which the father only condemned her sister?"

"Because she once vowed to share that sister's fate, whatever it might be."

"Her love for her sister is then greater than any other pa.s.sion she may have had."

"I don't know; there were other motives beside love to influence her,"

explained Frank, and said no more.

Edgar sank again into silence. It was Frank who spoke next.

"Do you think"--He paused and moistened his lips--"Have you doubted what our duty is about this matter?"

"To leave the girl--you said it yourself. Have you any other idea, Frank?"

"No, no; that is not what I mean," stammered Etheridge. "I mean about--about--the father's death. Should the world know? Is it a matter for the--for the police?"

"No," cried Edgar, aghast. "Mr. Cavanagh evidently killed himself. It is a dreadful thing to know, but I do not see why we need make it public."

Frank drew a long breath.

"I feared," he said,--"I did not know but you would think my duty would lie in--in----"

"Don't speak of it," exclaimed Edgar. "If you do not wish to finish reading her confession, put it up. Here is a drawer, in which you can safely lock it."

Frank, recoiling from the touch of those papers which had made such a havoc with his life, motioned to Edgar to do what he would with them.

"Are you not going to write--to answer this in some way?" asked Edgar.

"Thank G.o.d she has not made that necessary. She wrote somewhere, in the beginning, I think, that, if I felt the terror of her words too deeply, I was to pa.s.s by her house on the other side of the street at an early hour in the morning. Did she dream that I could do anything else?"

Edgar closed the drawer in which he had hidden her letter, locked it, and laid the key down on the table beside Frank.

Frank did not observe the action; he had risen to his feet, and in another moment had left the room. He had reached the point of feeling the need of air and a wider s.p.a.ce in which to breathe. As he stepped into the street, he turned in a contrary direction to that in which he had been wont to walk. Had he not done this; had he gone southward, as usual, he might have seen the sly and crouching figure which was drawn up on that side of the house, peering into the room he had just left through the narrow opening made by an imperfectly lowered shade.

BOOK III.

UNCLE AND NIECE.

XXVI.

THE WHITE POWDER.

It was nine o'clock in the morning, and Hermione stood in the laboratory window overlooking the street. Pale from loss of sleep and exhausted with the fever of anxiety which had consumed her ever since she had despatched her letter to Mr. Etheridge, she looked little able to cope with any disappointment which might be in store for her. But as she leaned there watching for Frank, it was evident from her whole bearing that she was moved by a fearful hope rather than by an overmastering dread; perhaps because she had such confidence in his devotion; perhaps because there was such vitality in her own love.

Her manner was that of one who thinks himself alone, and yet she was not alone. At the other end of the long and dismal apartment glided the sly figure of Huckins. No longer shabby and unkempt, but dressed with a neatness which would have made his sister Cynthia stare in amazement if she could have risen from her grave to see him, he flitted about with noiseless tread, listening to every sigh that escaped from his niece's lips, and marking, though he scarcely glanced her way, each turn of her head and each bend of her body, as if he were fully aware of her reasons for standing there, and the importance of the issues hanging upon the occurrences of the next fifteen minutes.

She may have known of his presence, and she may not. Her preoccupation was great, and her attention fixed not upon anything in the room, but upon the street without. Yet she may have felt the influence of that gliding Evil, moving, snake-like, at her back. If she did she gave no sign, and the moments came and went without any change in her eager att.i.tude or any cessation in the ceaseless movements with which he beguiled his own anxiety and the devilish purposes which were slowly forming themselves in his selfish and wicked mind.

At length she gave a start, and leaned heavily forward. Huckins, who was expecting this proof of sudden interest, paused where he was, and surveyed her with undisguised eagerness in his baleful eyes, while the words "She sees him; he is coming" formed themselves upon his thin and quivering lips, though no sound disturbed the silence, and neither he nor she seemed to breathe.

And he was right. Frank was coming down the street, not gayly and with the buoyant step of a happy lover, but with head sunk upon his breast and eyes lowered to the ground. Will he lift them as he approaches the gate? Will he smile, as in the olden time--the olden time that was yesterday--and raise his hand towards the gate and swing it back and enter with that lightsome air of his at once protecting and joy-inspiring? He looks very serious now, and his steps falter; but surely, surely, his love is not going to fail him at the crisis; surely, surely, he who has overlooked so much will not be daunted by the little more with which she has tried his devotion; surely, surely---- But his eyes do not lift themselves. He is at the gate, but his hand is not raised to it, and the smile does not come. He is going by, not on the other side of the street, but going by, going by, which means----

As the consciousness of what it did mean pierced her heart and soul, Hermione gave a great cry--she never knew how great a cry--and, staring like one demented after the beloved figure that in her disordered sight seemed to shrink and waver as it vanished, sank helpless upon the window sill, with her head falling forward, in a deadly faint.

Huckins, hearing that cry, slowly rubbed his hands together and smiled as the Dark One might smile at the sudden downfall of some doubtful soul. Then he pa.s.sed softly to the door, and, shutting it carefully, came back and recommenced his restless pacings, but this time with an apparent purpose of investigation, for he opened and shut drawers, not quietly, but with a decided clatter, and peered here and there into bottles and jars, casting, as he did so, ready side-glances at the drooping figure from which the moans of a fatal despair were now slowly breaking.

When those moans became words, he stopped and listened, and this was what he heard come faltering from her lips:

"Twice! twice! Once when I felt myself strong and now when I feel myself weak. It is too much for a proud woman. I cannot bear it."

At this evidence of revolt and discouragement, Huckins' smile grew in its triumph. He seemed to glide nearer to her; yet he did not stir.

She saw nothing. If she had once recognized his presence, he was to her now as one blotted from existence. She was saying over and over to herself: "No hope! no hope! I am cursed! My father's hate reaches higher than my prayers. There is no escape; no love, no light. Solitude is before me; solitude forever. Believing this, I cannot live; indeed I cannot!"

As if this had been the word for which he was waiting, Huckins suddenly straightened up his lean figure and began himself to talk, not as she did, in wild and pa.s.sionate tones, but in low, abstracted murmurs, as if he were too intent upon a certain discovery he had made to know or care whether there was or was not any one present to overhear his words.