Ravenshoe. By Henry Kingsley.

378 RAVENSHOE.
said Adelaide. "I had a dim suspicion of this, Ascot. It is horrible. We are ruined."
"Not yet," said Lord Ascot.
"There is time, — time. He is obstinate and mad. Lord
Saltire might die-"
"Well? "
"Either of them," she hissed out. "Is there no-"
" No what?"
"There is a half a million of money," said Adelaide.
"Well?"
"All sorts of things happen to people."
Lord Ascot looked at her for an instant, and snarled out a
curse at her.
John Marston was perfectly right. He was a savage, untamable blackguard. He went up-stairs into his bed-room. The
two angels were with him. They are with all of us at such
times as these. There is no plagiarism here. The fact is too
old for that.
Up and down, up and down. The bed-room was not long
enough; so he opened the door of the dressing-room; and that
was not long enough; and he opened the door of what had been
the nursery in a happier household than his, and walked up and
down through them all. And Adelaide sat below, before a single
candle, with pale face and clenched lips, listening to his footfall
on the floor above.
She knew as well as if an-angel had told her what was passing in his mind as he walked up and down. She had foreseen
this crisis plainly, —you may laugh at me, but she had. She
had seen that if, by any wild conjunction of circumstances, Charles
Ravenshoe were alive, and if he were to come across him before
Lord Saltire's death, events would arrange themselves exactly as
they were doing on this terrible evening. There was something
awful and terrible in the realization of her morbid suspicions.
Yes, she had seen thus far, and had laughed at herself for
entertaining such mad fancies. But she had seen no further.
What the upshot would be was hidden from her like a dark veil.
Black and impenetrable as the fog which was hanging over Waterloo Bridge at that moment, which made the squalid figure of a
young, desperate girl show like a pale, fluttering ghost, leading a
man whom we know well, a man who followed her, on the road
to - what?
The rest, though, seemed to be, in some sort, in her.own
hands. Wealth, position in the world, the power of driving her
chariot over the necks of those who had scorned her, - the only
things for which her worthless heart cared, - were all at stake.
c "He will murder me," she said, " but he shall hear me."