CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE AVENGER.
Several days passed in the gloomy mansion misnamed Dell-Delight. Miriam
and Paul avoided each other like death. Both dreaded like death any
illusion to the awful subject that lay so heavy upon the heart of each.
Paul, unacquainted with her thoughts, and relying upon her promise to do
nothing with the letters without further evidence, contented himself
with watching her motions, feeling comparatively at ease as long as she
should remain in the house; and being resolved to prevent her from going
forth, or to accompany her if she persisted in leaving home.
With Miriam, the shock, the anguish, the struggle had well-nigh passed;
she was at once subdued and resolved, like one into whom some spirit had
entered and bound her own spirit, and acted through her. So strange did
all appear to her, so strange the impassiveness of her own will, of her
habits and affections, that should have rebelled and warred against her
purpose that she sometimes thought herself not herself, or insane, or
the subject of a monomania, or some strange hallucination, a dreamer, a
somnambulist, perhaps. And yet with matchless tact and discretion, she
went about her deadly work. She had prepared her plan of action, and now
waited only for a day very near at hand, the fourth of April, the
anniversary of Marian's assassination, to put Thurston to a final test
before proceeding further.
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