An hour later, and Christabel, pale and exhausted, her garments heavy with dew, was kneeling by her boy's bed in the faint light of the night-lamp; kneeling by him as she had knelt a year ago, but never since her return from Switzerland--praying as she had not prayed since Angus Hamleigh's death. After those long, passionate prayers, she rose and looked at the slumberer's face--her husband's face in little--but oh! how pure and fresh and radiant. God keep him from boyhood's sins of self-love and self-indulgence--from manhood's evil passions, hatred and jealousy. All her life to come seemed too little to be devoted to watching and guarding this beloved from the encircling snares and dangers of life. Pure and innocent now, in this fair dawn of infancy, he nestled in her arms--he clung to her and believed in her. What business had she with any other fears, desires, or hopes--God having given her the sacred duties of maternity--the master-passion of motherly love? "I have been mad!" she said to herself; "I have been living in a ghastly dream: but God has awakened me--God's word has cured me." God's word had come to her at the crisis of her life. A month ago, while her scheme of vengeance seemed still far from fulfilment, that awful sentence would hardly have struck so deeply. It was on the very verge of the abyss that those familiar words caught her; just when the natural faltering of her womanhood, upon the eve of a terrible crime, made her most sensitive to a sublime impression. The first faint streak of day glimmered in the east, a pale cold light, livid and ghostly upon the edge of the sea yonder, white and wan upon the eastward points of rock and headland, when Jessie Bridgeman was startled from her light slumbers by a voice at her bedside. She was always an early riser, and it cost her no effect to sit up in bed, with her eyes wide open, and all her senses on the alert. "Christabel, what is the matter? Is Leo ill?" "No, Leo is well enough. Get up and dress yourself quickly, Jessie. I want you to come with me--on a strange errand; but it is something that must be done, and at once." "Christabel, you are mad." "No. I have been mad. I think you must know it--this is the awakening. Come, Jessie." Jessie had sprung out of bed, and put on slippers and dressing-gown, without taking her eyes off Christabel. Presently she felt her cloak and gown. "Why, you are wet through. Where have you been?" "To Angus Hamleigh's grave. Who put that inscription on the cross?" "I did. Nobody seemed to care about his grave--no one attended to it. I got to think the grave my own property, and that I might do as I liked with it." "But those awful words! What made you put them there?" "I wanted the man who killed him to be reminded that there is an Avenger." "Wash your face and put on your clothes as fast as you can. Every moment is of consequence," said Christabel.