She could speak no more.  She had said enough.  Helen remembered the stories she had heard on coming to the village, and among them one referred to in an early chapter of this narrative.  All the unaccountable looks and tastes and ways of Elsie came back to her in the light of an ante-natal impression which had mingled an alien element in her nature.  She knew the secret of the fascination which looked out of her cold, glittering eyes.  She knew the significance of the strange repulsion which—­she felt in her own intimate consciousness underlying the inexplicable attraction which drew her towards the young girl in spite of this repugnance.  She began to look with new feelings on the contradictions in her moral nature,—­the longing for sympathy, as shown by her wishing for Helen’s company, and the impossibility of passing beyond the cold circle of isolation within which she had her being.  The fearful truth of that instinctive feeling of hers, that there was something not human looking out of Elsie’s eyes, came upon her with a sudden flash of penetrating conviction.  There were two warring principles in that superb organization and proud soul.  One made her a woman, with all a woman’s powers and longings.  The other chilled all the currents of outlet for her emotions.  It made her tearless and mute, when another woman would have wept and pleaded.  And it infused into her soul something—­it was cruel now to call it malice—­which was still and watchful and dangerous,—­which waited its opportunity, and then shot like an arrow from its bow out of the coil of brooding premeditation.  Even those who had never seen the white scars on Dick Venner’s wrist, or heard the half-told story of her supposed attempt to do a graver mischief, knew well enough by looking at her that she was one of the creatures not to be tampered with,—­silent in anger and swift in vengeance.

Helen could not return to the bedside at once after this communication.  It was with altered eyes that she must look on the poor girl, the victim of such an unheard-of fatality.  All was explained to her now.  But it opened such depths of solemn thought in her awakened consciousness, that it seemed as if the whole mystery of human life were coming up again before her for trial and judgment.  “Oh,” she thought, “if, while the will lies sealed in its fountain, it may be poisoned at its very source, so that it shall flow dark and deadly through its whole course, who are we that we should judge our fellow-creatures by ourselves?” Then came the terrible question, how far the elements themselves are capable of perverting the moral nature:  if valor, and justice, and truth, the strength of man and the virtue of woman, may not be poisoned out of a race by the food of the Australian in his forest,—­by the foul air and darkness of the Christians cooped up in the “tenement-houses close by those who live in the palaces of the great cities?”