been carried away by the instinct of self-preservation, and had taken up what was readiest at hand, without a wish to do more than emancipate herself from the grasp of the man she detested. He had brought the consequences on his own eyes by his own act.
But though she quite recognised that he had done this, and that he richly deserved the consequences, yet she could not relieve her conscience from the gnawings of self-reproach, from the scalding blush of shame at having executed a savage, unwomanly vengeance on the man who had wronged her. Had her victim been a woman and a rival, she would perhaps have gloried in her act; but the female mind is perverse in its twists and complexion, and it will tingle with pain for having hurt a man, however little that man may be loved, when it would plume itself for having done the same to a woman who has been a friend. A woman must think and act rightly towards a man, but can do neither towards one of her own sex.
Mehalah's bosom was a prey to conflicting emotions. She pitied Elijah, and she pitied George. Her deep pity for George forced her to hate his torturer, and grudge him no suffering to expiate his offence. When she thought of what George De Witt must have endured in the vault, of his privations there, of the gradual darkening and disturbance of his faculties, and then of how Elijah had stepped between him and her, and spoiled their mutual dream of happiness, and ruined both their lives, the hot blood boiled in her heart, and she felt that she could deal Rebow the stroke again, deliberately, knowing what the result must be, as a retributive act. But when she heard him, as now, pacing the oak parlour, and in his blindness striking against the walls, her pity for him mounted and overlapped her wrath. Moreover, she was perplexed about the story of George's imprisonment. There was something in it she could not reconcile with what she knew. Elijah had confessed that on the night of George's disappearance he had enticed the young man to Red Hall, made him drunk or drugged him, and then chained him in the vault, in the place of his own brother who had died. It was Rebow and not De Witt who, that same night, had appeared at her window, driven in the glass and flung the medal at
