The long silence of Susan Riley terrified her. She knew that an evil eye was ever watching an opportunity for her destruction, and in her monomania--for her terror of the woman amounted to this--she attributed impossible powers of mischief to her malignant hate. She had received two warnings from her enemy already, and she felt an intuition, a certain conviction, which she could not reason away, that there would be a _third_--that a last, cruellest blow would be struck which would prove fatal to her; and she would kneel down in her room and pray in tears and agony that the blow might strike herself alone, and not her husband and the little babe that was to be soon born into the world. To her it seemed unnatural and dreadful that she who had once so nearly been a killer of babes should become a mother. Was it--she thought--the just vengeance of God that was about to visit her? Was she to have a child, only that it might be torn from her at once, only that her punishment might be the more severe in its remorse-awaking appositeness to her crime! She remembered that first warning, that letter in which Susan had written, "_I'll stand as fairy godmother to your baby_," underlining the ominous sentence. These words seemed now full of fearful meaning; they were never out of her mind; and she could always see them before her standing out in characters of blood. "She is capable even of that," she thought with horror, as the idea of a fiendish revenge occurred to her. Shortly before her confinement, she suffered from an extreme agitation. She felt that the whole world was about to slip away from her. "And what will happen to my baby," she said to herself, "if I go mad and cannot protect it? No! I must not go mad! O God! give me strength against madness. She will take my innocent babe away if I am not there to watch." In her fear for her unborn child, she thought of breaking her oath and telling her husband all; then she reflected that to do this would be of no avail. What could she tell him?--that the Secret Society to which she had belonged had been formed for a certain object; that the Society had broken up. That was all--what definite accusation could she make against anyone? She had no reason for imagining that Susan Riley was plotting her destruction, except that a strong, instinctive voice told her so. If she confided this to her husband, he would merely regard her dread as a species of insane delusion. No! better far to preserve her secret, and endeavour to shield her child by other means. So one night she came up to the chair on which her husband was sitting, and placing herself at his feet, she seized his hands and looked earnestly into his face. "Harry!" she said, "I have something very important to ask you." "What is it, my pet?" "You will not laugh at me or think me foolish?" "Why, Mary! you know I will not do so, especially when your poor little face looks so serious as it does now."