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secretly in love with Adam. When Ezra returns, Christine confesses her infidelity and, when this sends him into a kind of heart attack, cold-bloodedly poisons him with what he thinks is medicine (note: keep this scene in mind when we travel South and consider the opera Regina). Lavinia bursts in just in time to hear her dying father accuse her unfaithful mother of murder. Orin arrives for his father's funeral wearing a bandage covering a head wound he has sustained in the war; we are to understand that perhaps his wound makes all his subsequent behavior a little addled. Orin and Christine are very close, and of course Christine does not want her son to know she has killed Ezra, but Lavinia manages to meet with her brother in private and reveals all. When Christine goes to Adam aboard his ship, pleading with him to take her away, Orin and Lavinia follow her. Once she is back on the pier (Adam isn't in a position to flee with her on the spot) Orin conceals himself in his cousin's cabin and then springs out to stab Adam dead. Lavinia urges her brother to make it appear that thieves had committed the crime. The siblings then return home to confront Christine, who commits suicide by pistol at the news of her lover's death at the hand of her beloved son. "Justice!" declares Lavinia. But the Greek tragedy isn't over yet.
Orin is devoured by guilt over everything that has happened. He writes out a history of all the deaths and betrayals, telling his sister, "You have a place of honor here, the strangest criminal of all," because of her sheer remorselessness. In his confused state, he approaches her as a lover, as if adding incest can't possibly make things any worse: "Our love is dark with guilt, the guilt we share." She pushes him away, calling him vile. He then commits suicide with perhaps the very same pistol as his mother had used to kill herself. As in Lizzie Borden, some time passes. Although a gentle, innocent suitor has hoped to marry her, unaware of the family dirt, after Orin's death Lavinia tells him never to call again. And as in Lizzie, the opera ends as she shuts herself into the family home to live a solitary life of torment for her losses and crimes: "Welcome me! Welcome me! Orin, Mother, Father, House
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