“Yes, Raymond Challoner, at your service,” he responded, cynically.
“What are you doing here?” she cried, hoarsely, still wondering if she were not laboring under some horrible nightmare.
“What to you seems now so astounding can be most easily explained,” he answered. “I am the nephew of the man you have wedded; the one who should have been his heir, and whom he discarded.”
That this information was astounding to Queenie he could readily see, and because of that he readily conjectured that her husband had not mentioned him to his bride, for which he was now truly thankful.
It took but an instant for Queenie to recover herself. The color rushed back to her deathly white face, and the cold, harsh expression her features had worn of late came suddenly back to them as the thought crossed her mind that at last she was revenged upon Raymond Challoner, for had she not every dollar of the wealth that would have been his at that moment but for her? But in the next instant she realized that her hour of triumph over him had not yet come, for she was in his power; one word from his lips would send her——
She did not follow out the rest of the sentence; she dared not. “Come,” he said, touching her on the arm, and placing her with a firm, masterful hand into an armchair close by, “you must not give way to your emotions. You will need all your self-control.”
In a few words he explained his presence in that room; that he had come to call on his uncle; the bitter quarrel that ensued, ending in apoplexy which had caused the accident; his call for a doctor, and volunteering to remain by his uncle’s side until the return of his wife, and of his intense amazement to learn who that wife was—his own sweetheart of other days—and how he had retired behind the heavy draperies of the windows for the purpose of making known his presence to her when he should find her alone, fearing that some sort of a scene might ensue.
“Why did you not make your presence known at once, as soon as the servants had left the room?” she gasped.
“I was conning over in my mind whether it was really best to acquaint you with my presence beneath your roof, or to wait until morning and go quietly away without revealing myself to you. In the face of what has occurred, I knew that the best thing to do was to apprise you of my presence.”
“What do you intend to do?” she queried, hoarsely, her hands trembling like aspen leaves as they clutched the arm of the chair for support.