The Works of George W. M. Reynolds — page 187: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

-_ 170 REYNOLDS’ WORKS wretched obscurity? For wretched such obscurity would indeed prove to the proud, the active, and the domineering disposition of the ambitious Lady Saxondale. Ah! but how to avoid all this? That was the question. That she could still coerce Edmund if he were alone, she had no doubt. She would practise with him a new game: instead of tyrannizing over him, she would flatter, cajole, and coax him, she would immerse him in pleasures, she would surround him with the luxuries which he loved, she would adopt every means to enervate and emascu- late him, and thus would she acquire the fullest ascend- ency over his mind, so as virtually to keep him imprisoned within the scope of her influence. All this she might do if he were alone, but he was not. He had continually by his side a woman as astute, as artful, as designing, and as penetrating as herself, a woman who could doubt- less prove equally unscrupulous, a woman who, Lady Saxondale doubted not, was but too surely guilty of the crime of husband-murder of which she had been accused. This woman, then, 1t was who now stood as an impassable barrier in Lady Saxondale’s pathway. But could not this barrier be removed? Could not that woman be stricken down in the midst of that path where her presence was so formidable? Yes, doubtless, by a crime, and only by a crime. Oh! but a crime. Heavens! had not Lady Saxondale supped full of the horrors of crime already? Crime! crime! was it to be ever crime? Alas, when once the road of iniquity is entered upon, crime after crime must mark the advance of those who tread it; blood-stained milestones do they become, indicating distances passed in safety, and pointing intervals of a still guiltier progress. Did her ladyship shudder as the thought of another crime, —one more crime, — a crime that was to be the last and the crowning one, thus gradually arose in her imagination as she ap- proached the castle on returning from her half-distracted ramble? Or did she begin to envisage it as the only possible alternative that was to save from utter ruin the fabric of that power which she had hitherto taken so much pains to build up? Were her warrings by day and her long agonies of toil by night, her schemings and her plottings, her ma- nceuvres and her chicaneries, to have been passed through CONNIE OO! KS (E(0)