She followed the maid's instructions and walked very fast all the way, in hopes that the rapid motion would drive away her nervousness. At the bridge she stood still for a few moments, and drawing a bottle from her pocket which contained laudanum, or some other drug, she drank a small quantity of it. Then she looked down the white road before turning off into the wood, and she saw in the distance a countryman dragging along a ram by a cord. The sight called up memories of old lessons of her childhood. She laughed bitterly to herself. "Ah! were I a Christian, I might accept that as a good omen. Jehovah found Abraham such a substitute at the last moment when he was about to sacrifice his only son. But for me, alas! there can be no such hope." She walked along the narrow foot-path by the river-side for some way, when suddenly she heard a sweet human voice rising and falling in a song wild and untaught as a lark's, a song that seemed to ring with such ecstacy of pure happiness that she paused to listen. In her present mood the gladness of it stung her, and she ground her teeth in her agony. Then she turned pale and listened intently--yes, the voice was familiar to her! Cautiously she approached, until she came to some bushes, from behind which, herself concealed, she perceived Mary sitting on the river-bank close to her, singing and playing with the flowers. The woman stood quite still and watched the girl for several minutes. What a storm of passions was sweeping across her fierce mind, torturing the iron will! At first she felt nothing but a mad hate--the strong hate of jealousy. But the pathetic image of the happy, half-crazed girl soon raised other emotions. Love and hate together, joining in one new, wild passion rose to torment her. Ah, how she hated, how she loved, that weak child yonder! Her soul yearned upon her. Yet she longed to kill her then and there--to stab and then clasp the dying girl in her arms--to lie down by her, kissing the beloved lips--to drink her last breath and die with her! Ah! how sweet to die with her!--in one long, last kiss--kissing and stabbing her, loving and torturing her, at the same time. Strange, impossible fancies crowded on her mind. A passion that was not love, that was not hate, but the unnatural offspring of the two and fiercer than either, possessed her--such a discordant passion, as we are told by the Grecian myths, the Furies sow in the minds of men whom the Gods have doomed to destruction. She looked, and she gnashed her teeth with hate; she looked again, and tears came into her hot eyes to see her Mary--the dear child--the sole human being she had ever loved! Yes! she must run forward to her, fall down and kiss those bare white feet, forego her vengeance and beg herself for forgiveness. But no, no--it could not be. The girl loved a man. She had herself confessed to it. She must die.