“Damoride hears those terrible words; Damoride clasps her hands in entreaty. ‘Oh, madam! madam! how can I kill the dear and noble lady? What motive have I for harming her?’ Cunegonda answers, ‘You have the motive of obeying Me.’ (Damoride falls with her face on the floor at her mistress’s feet.) ‘Madam, I cannot do it! Madam, I dare not do it!’ Cunegonda answers, ‘You run no risk: I have my plan for diverting discovery from myself, and my plan for diverting discovery from you.’ Damoride repeats, ‘I cannot do it! I dare not do it!’ Cunegonda’s eyes flash lightnings of rage. She takes from its place of concealment in her bosom--” He stopped in the middle of the sentence, and put his hand to his head--not like a man in pain, but like a man who had lost his idea. Would it be well if I tried to help him to recover his idea? or would it be wiser (if I could only do it) to keep silence? I could see the drift of his story plainly enough. His object, under the thin disguise of the Italian romance, was to meet my unanswerable objection to suspecting Mrs. Beauly’s maid--the objection that the woman had no motive for committing herself to an act of murder. If he could practically contradict this, by discovering a motive which I should be obliged to admit, his end would be gained. Those inquiries which I had pledged myself to pursue--those inquiries which might, at any moment, take a turn that directly concerned him--would, in that case, be successfully diverted from the right to the wrong person. The innocent maid would set my strictest scrutiny at defiance; and Dexter would be safely shielded behind her. I determined to give him time. Not a word passed my lips. The minutes followed each other. I waited in the deepest anxiety. It was a trying and a critical moment. If he succeeded in inventing a probable motive, and in shaping it neatly to suit the purpose of his story, he would prove, by that act alone, that there were reserves of mental power still left in him which the practiced eye of the Scotch doctor had failed to see. But the question was--would he do it? He did it! Not in a new way; not in a convincing way; not without a painfully evident effort. Still, well done or ill done, he found a motive for the maid.