"I shall go to your lawyer," he said, "and I shall not rest until my client has all his rights—the rights of which he would not have heard for many a day but for me. When he is in full possession of them, I will ask you to be good enough to remember a pledge that I gave you once, and which I shall then have fully redeemed. I always endeavor to pay my debts; and, as you are well aware, I owe you a very heavy debt at present. I hope to repay it very soon—with interest."
"I am well aware that you are a malicious and a dishonorable man," she replied, calmly. "Because your treachery with regard to Helen recoiled on yourself, you have determined to injure me. Do your worst. Nothing that you could do would make you more despicable in my eyes than you are at present. This is all that need be said between us. Will you go now, or shall I be forced to leave you?"
"I shall go at once," he answered; "but you will permit me to offer you a little parting advice. Enjoy as much as possible the fortune which you hold now, for your possession of it will be very short."
With this last sting he went out from her presence; and she, sinking into Mr. Singleton's deep chair, clasped her hands over her painfully-beating heart, and looked with troubled eyes over the soft landscape before her, of which she hardly perceived a feature.
And so she was, after all, to lose the fortune for which she had sacrificed everything else! It had by no means brought her the satisfaction or happiness she had imagined, but it was all that remained to her—the one good which she still grasped out of the wreck she had already made of her life, and her life's best hopes. To lose it now, to sink back again into poverty and dependence after one brief taste of power and independence, that would be a bitter retribution for the choice she had made when she sent Brian Earle away,—a bitter retribution for the selfish vanity which had made Rathborne her enemy. She shuddered a little at the recollection of that enmity. Bravely as she had borne herself before him, it was a dismaying thought that such a power and such a will to injure menaced her. She thought of her proud self-confidence when from the quiet convent she had stepped into the world: her belief in her own ability to mould life, events, and people to her wishes. And now with what absolute failure she was threatened!—with what complete and hopeless loss of all that she desired!
The next day her lawyer came with a grave face, and greeted her with an air which was not lost upon her. "He thinks that it is all over with me!" she said to herself; but, though her heart sank a little lower at this proof of the weakness of her cause, she smiled on him brightly and bravely enough.
"I suppose," she began, "that you have seen Mr. Rathborne, who was so kind as to pay me a visit yesterday in order to give me some interesting intelligence?"
"Yes, I have seen Mr. Rathborne," he answered; "and the news he brought me was very unexpected and very serious."
"What do you think of it?" she asked.
The lawyer looked at her with surprise. The coolness of her tone and the composure of her manner seemed to indicate that she by no means appreciated the gravity of the danger which threatened her.