victim knew that the execution of the barbarous menace would be strict
to the letter, and that it would be but little preferable to death
itself. Yet, in spite of this, she now, for the first time, failed to
cower and tremble, but arose and faced her oppressor, erect and defiant.
The last drop had now been dashed into the cup of endurance,--the final
blow had been struck, under which the human spirit either falls crushed
and prostrated forever, or from which it springs up tempered to
adamantine hardness, and incapable thenceforth of feeling either fear
for itself or pity for its smiter. That one moment had entirely reversed
the relations of the two, making the slave mistress of her mistress's
fate, while the latter thenceforward held her very existence at the will
of her slave. The cruel woman had raised up for herself that enemy more
terrible even to throned tyrants than an army with banners: for there
is something truly terrific in the almost omnipotent power of harm
possessed by any intelligent being, whom hatred, or fanaticism, or
suffering has wound up to that point of desperation where it is willing
to throw away its own life in order to reach that of an adversary,
--such desperation as inspired the gladiator Maternus, in his romantic
expedition from the woods of Transylvania through the marshes of
Pannonia and the Alpine passes, to strike the lord of the Roman world
in the recesses of his own palace, and in the presence of his thousand
guards. He who has provoked such hostility can know no safety, but in
the destruction of his enemy,--a fact well understood by the elder
Napoleon, who, however he might admire, never pardoned those whose
attempts on his person showed them utterly reckless of the safety of
their own.

And now, for a few hours, the whole interest of our narrative centres in
her whom that moment had so completely transformed and made already a
murderess in heart and in purpose. And how thoroughly must that heart