Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/243

 other days; again, with a renewed bitterness, they rose up before her; again she strove with a mighty sorrow, a cruel wrong, an unmerited disgrace, a fierce temptation, a ready revenge, a yielding circumstance; again she weighed chances long passed, and pondered probabilities all long gone by, and balanced with trembling hands and wavering brain the eternal right and wrong.

Again she seemed to look with bitter anguish on the face of the dead; again, by her persistent will, she tore open the deep but unforgotten wounds of her heart, and laid her own fierce hand on the unhealed scars that bled with a touch.

Alas! there was no comfort there. What had all that suffering brought her, that a chance word might not have swept away?

She never for a moment doubted that Alice would question her—she knew the girl too well to doubt it. That quick, imperative spirit was too like her own for her to think for a moment that she would relinquish her purpose. How could she baffle or resist her? and what and how should she answer her eager inquiries? What to keep