"I will be ready in a minute; but, Mrs. Fleming, you will never tell any one about it, will you?"
"Never," she says, smiling, and goes away.
To my knock at Silvia's door, I receive no answer; pushing it open, I enter. She is standing by a window, looking at the smoke that rises from the spot where the bolt lies embedded. She is talking to herself, and does not seem to see or hear me, although I am before her eyes.
"I was wrong to wish it had killed me," she mutters. "After all it's a stupid thing to do—to die. Talk of the proud contempt of spirits risen! it is the living who have the best of it, and despise the dead. If I had died to-day, the women who hate me would have said, 'Poor creature!' he would have said, 'Poor Silvia.' I should have been poor Silvia, a weak loving fool to all eternity to him. I will live!—live to punish the scorn and coldness that has dared repay such love as mine—live to make him rue the day he made Silvia Fleming stoop to pray in vain. When he least expects me, I will be there: in the hour of his joy, I will stand by his side, and strike the cup from his lips; in his night of sorrow, I will rejoice over him-and since I cannot have his love, I will work his misery—and this I will do, so help me, God!"
The last lurid gleam of the storm is on her set face, and in her wide eyes. Has the afternoon actually crazed her brain?
"Are you there, child?" she says, turning round sharply. "Have you heard all the nonsense I have been talking?"
"Some of it."
"Bah!" she says; "I have a bad habit of talking aloud. You were a good little thing to come out and find me like that. It would not have been pleasant to be killed by that bolt, eh?"
"No," I say, shuddering; "but it was very near, a narrow escape. Have you told Mrs. Fleming?"
"Not I! How that old woman, my aunt, would have hopped,
