"I have seen that before; how I longed for it! If anything ever happens to him, I claim that as my legacy." Their hands met as he said this, and grasped each other convulsively; Lucretia relocked the secretary, and when she gained the next room, she tottered to a chair.

Her strong nerves gave way for the moment; she uttered no cry, but by the whiteness of her face, Gabriel saw that she was senseless,--senseless for a minute or so; scarcely more.

But the return to consciousness with a clenched hand, and a brow of defiance, and a stare of mingled desperation and dismay, seemed rather the awaking from some frightful dream of violence and struggle than the slow, languid recovery from the faintness of a swoon.

Yes, henceforth, to sleep was to couch by a serpent,--to breathe was to listen for the avalanche! Thou who didst trifle so wantonly with Treason, now gravely front the grim comrade thou hast won; thou scheming desecrator of the Household Gods, now learn, to the last page of dark knowledge, what the hearth is without them! Gabriel was strangely moved as he beheld that proud and solitary despair.

An instinct of nature had hitherto checked him from actively aiding Lucretia in that struggle with his father which could but end in the destruction of one or the other.