at the same time taking the phial and drinking its contents.
"Miss you, dearest!—how wretched, how inexpressibly wretched should I be without you!"
"I am glad of it!" she cried, springing from her kneeling and caressing attitude, and flinging down the phial, which broke into atoms. "Do you see that? its contents were poison, and I have drank it—drank it even in your very arms! I know all, De Vere—your false marriage, your mock priest. You thought it but a jest to dishonour and to destroy one who trusted you so fondly, so utterly. Go find another to love you as I have done! You planned inconstancy from the first, when I most believed in your love. Well, a little while, and you are free!"
She fell back in a paroxysm of bodily agony, and hid her face in the cushions, but De Vere saw her frame writhe with torture. Suddenly she started up—"I cannot bear it—give me water, for the love of Heaven!"
Her exquisite features were distorted, the blue veins were swollen on her forehead, and her livid lips were covered with froth: again she dashed herself on the ground, and her screams, though smothered, were still audible.
De Vere hung over her in anguish scarce inferior to her own; his call for assistance brought the attendants, and with them the physician, who had just left the chamber of death above.
