"Who is it, you mean," said the woman, with a taunting laugh. "It is Lady Branwin, Miss Rosy Pearl. You won't be able to marry my husband after all."
Miss Pearl, for once, was shaken out of her calmness, and but for her fashionable hat her hair would have risen on end. "Lady Branwin is dead!" she gasped, shrinking from the shapeless figure.
"Lady Branwin is very much alive," jeered the other woman, pointing at Sir Joseph. "Look at that beast--that beast!" She glared.
Sir Joseph, astonished at this speech from his hitherto meek wife, recovered himself with a violent effort. "You aren't Dora. She would never had dared to speak to me like that. You are Flora, who--"
"I am Dora, who has been hammered into hardness by your cruelty. Flora is dead, and I masqueraded as her with the yashmak, and--"
"Then--then," stammered Miss Pearl, with genuine horror, "you killed her?"
"Yes," said Lady Branwin, simply, and looked triumphantly at her husband. "I killed her because she threatened to tell Joseph that Audrey was not his daughter."
"You--you fiend!" stuttered Branwin, with a look of positive terror in his eyes. He could not understand how his formerly meek wife had changed into this hard, desperate woman, any more than he could exactly grasp how she had arisen from the dead in this startling fashion.
"I am what you have made me," said Lady Branwin, fiercely. "I was a good woman until you turned me into a fiend. But I have seen Audrey, and I have told her all the truth. Then I came down here to do justice."
"How--how did you know that I was here?" demanded Sir Joseph, who did not like the sinister looks of his wife.