Without a word Elsa rose from her chair and walked back into the adjoining room. A moment later she reappeared, leading a beautiful girl who was perhaps twenty years old.
The effect was electric. The people in the little group seemed frozen into the attitudes they had last assumed.
Only in Nat Burns was there a change.
He seemed to have shrunk back into his clothes until he was but a little, wizened man. His face was ghastly and clammy perspiration glittered on his forehead in the lamplight.
“Caroline!” he cried in a hoarse voice that did not rise above a whisper.
“Yes, Caroline,” said Elsa, her black eyes flashing fire. “You had forgotten her, hadn’t you? You had forgotten the girl who loved you, that you drove away from the island! You had forgotten the girl that gave you everything and got nothing! But that has come back upon you now, and these people are here to see it. Even your father, in his log-book, mentioned when my sister left Grande Mignon, apparently to work in the factory at Lubec. As though my sister should ever work in a factory!”
“So this explains why she went that time,” said Squire Hardy gently. “We all wondered at it, Elsa––we all wondered at it.”
“And well you might. But he is the cause! And he wouldn’t marry her! I have waited for this chance of revenge, and now he shall pay.”
Caroline Fuller, who was even more beautiful than her sister, looked at Nat in a kind of daze. Suddenly there was a spasmodic working of her features.