The widow stepped a few paces back out of reach of her victim, and stood regarding her with a smile of wicked triumph, while the witch, amid her dying groans, hurled the most awful maledictions upon her destroyer. "Ha, ha!" laughed Mrs. Vance, enjoying her revenge to the utmost limit; "did you think you could play with fire and not be burned? Did you think I would destroy a beautiful and valued life like that of Lily Lawrence, yet suffer two worn-out old hulks to stand between me and my cherished purpose? Ha, ha! you realize your folly, now!" Her words fell on deaf ears. Old Haidee had expired in horrible agonies, while the jeers and taunts of her destroyer yet echoed in her hearing. She lay inside the door-way where she had fallen, a hideous spectacle of death. Mrs. Vance lifted her foot and spurned the still body with all the intensity of the hate that burned in her heart. "They are both dead," she said, aloud. "My evil genius has helped me. I am safe now." She stepped across old Haidee's body with a slight thrill of repulsion, and entering the room, picked up her purse and began to collect the scattered gold coins. "I may as well have my money again," she thought to herself. "I need not be in a hurry to get away. No one ever comes here, I am sure." She placed the last coin in the purse and paused to look around her. Old Peter's ghastly dead face met her view. The wicked eyes, wide open and staring, seemed to threaten her as in life. A shiver of deadly fear thrilled along her veins, seeming to freeze them. "Great God!" she exclaimed. "What if my sins should find me out!" She lifted her slender, white hands and regarded them fixedly. "There is blood upon my hands," she said with an irrepressible shudder. "They look fair and white, but they have sent three human souls into the presence of their Creator. Pshaw! why do I pause to reflect here? Let me cover up the traces of my crime and go." She took up the shovel, and opening the door of the stove, pulled out a quantity of blazing fire-brands and scattered them recklessly upon the bare floor, tossing one so close to the body of old Peter that his shock of red hair was ignited and burned with a disagreeable stench. Mrs. Vance turned away with such a laugh as a fiend might have loved to hear, and hurried from the house, leaving the door, which she hastily unlocked, partly ajar. "It does not matter," she thought to herself. "No one will discover them. The old shell of a house will ignite from the brands directly and burn down to the ground." Drawing her veil tightly over her face she hurried away over the lonely road. About half a mile from the old house she met a man riding on horseback towards the route she was leaving. He scrutinized the solitary woman keenly, but could make nothing of her thickly shrouded features, and rode onward. "Some wayfarer," she thought carelessly, and hurried on, eager to leave the hated vicinity of her double crime. CHAPTER XXV.