“And may God curse you for it!  You have dared much, Lucy Munro, this hour.  You have bearded a worse fury than the tiger thirsting after blood.  What madness prompts you to this folly?  You have heard me avow my utter, uncontrollable hatred of this man—­my determination, if possible, to destroy him, and yet you interpose.  You dare to save him in my defiance.  You teach him our designs, and labor to thwart them yourself.  Hear me, girl! you know me well—­you know I never threaten without execution.  I can understand how it is that a spirit, feeling at this moment as does your own, should defy death.  But, bethink you—­is there nothing in your thought which is worse than death, from the terrors of which, the pure mind, however fortified by heroic resolution, must still shrink and tremble?  Beware, then, how you chafe me.  Say where the youth has gone, and in this way retrieve, if you can, the error which taught you to connive at his escape.”

“I know not what you mean, and have no fears of anything you can do.  On this point I feel secure, and bid you defiance.  To think now, that, having chiefly effected the escape of the youth, I would place him again within your power, argues a degree of stupidity in me that is wantonly insulting.  I tell you he has fled, by this time, beyond your reach.  I say no more.  It is enough that he is in safety; before a word of mine puts him in danger, I’ll perish by your hands, or any hands.”

“Then shall you perish, fool!” cried the ruffian; and his hand, hurried by the ferocious impulse of his rage, was again uplifted, when, in her struggles at freedom, a new object met his sight in the chain and portrait which Ralph had flung about her neck, and which, now falling from her bosom, arrested his attention, and seemed to awaken some recognition in his mind.  His hold relaxed upon her arm, and with eager haste he seized the portrait, tearing it away with a single wrench from the rich chain to which it was appended, and which now in broken fragments was strewed upon the floor.

Lucy sprang towards him convulsively, and vainly endeavored at its recovery.  Rivers broke the spring, and his eyes gazed with serpent-like fixedness upon the exquisitely beautiful features which it developed.  His whole appearance underwent a change.  The sternness had departed from his face which now put on an air of abstraction and wandering, not usually a habit with it.  He gazed long and fixedly upon the portrait, unheeding the efforts of the girl to obtain it, and muttering at frequent intervals detached sentences, having little dependence upon one another:—­

“Ay—­it is she,” he exclaimed—­“true to the life—­bright, beautiful, young, innocent—­and I—­But let me not think!”—­

Then turning to the maid—­

“Fond fool—­see you the object of adoration with him whom you so unprofitably adore.  He loves her, girl—­she, whom I—­but why should I tell it you? is it not enough that we have both loved and loved in vain; and, in my revenge, you too shall enjoy yours.”