oindexter's sins, or, perhaps,
remembered them, and that a child was given him also, after eighteen
years of married life, I looked upon your bonny face and saw--or thought
I saw--a possible means of bringing about the vengeance to which Felix
and I had dedicated our lives.

"You grew; your ardent nature, generous temper, and facile mind promised
an abundant manhood, and when your mother died, leaving me for a second
time a widower, I no longer hesitated to devote you to the purpose for
which you seemed born. Thomas, do you remember the beginning of that
journey which finally led you far from me? How I bore you on my shoulder
along a dusty road, till arrived within sight of his home, I raised you
from among the tombs and, showing you those distant gables looming black
against the twilight's gold, dedicated you to the destruction of
whatever happiness might hereafter develop under his infant's smile? You
do? I did not think you could forget; and now that the time has come for
the promise of that hour to be fulfilled, I call on you again, Thomas.
Avenge our griefs, avenge your sister. _Poindexter's girl has grown to
womanhood._"

At the suggestion conveyed in these words Thomas recoiled in horror. But
the old man failed to read his emotion rightly. Clutching his arm, he
proceeded passionately:

"Woo her! Win her! They do not know you. You will be Thomas Adams to
them, not Thomas Cadwalader. Gather this budding flower into your bosom,
and then--Oh, he must love his child! Through her we have our hand on
his heart. Make her suffer--she's but a country girl, and you have lived
in Paris--make her suffer, and if, in doing so, you cause him to blench,
then believe I am looking upon you from the grave I go to, and be happy;
for you will not have lived, nor will I have died, in vain."

He paused to catch his failing breath, but his indomitable will
triumphed over death and held Thomas under a spell that confounded his
instincts and made him the puppet of feelings which had accumulated
their force to fill him, in one hour, with a hate which it had taken his
father and brother a quarter of a century to bring to the point of
active vengeance.

"I shall die; I am dying now," the old man panted on. "I shall never
live to see your triumph; I shall never behold John Poindexter's eye
glaze with those sufferings which rend the entrails and make a man
question if there is a God in heaven. But I shall know it where I am. No
mounded ea