“You may search, but you will never find her, John Dinsmore!” she cried, hoarsely, beating her breast fiercely with her clinched hands. “I will look to that. You are parted as truly as though the grave yawned between you!”
When she reached her boudoir, and a little later looked in at Jess, she found her still lying in the same dead faint upon the floor.
She bent over the girl, gazing long and bitterly at the lovely, upturned young face, her eyes glowing luridly as she noted how perfect was the loveliness of her every feature.
“Yes, he has learned that he loves you, when it is too late!” she muttered, catching her breath hard. “I will strike his heart through you!”
She was not long in maturing her plans; she set to work to revive the girl without calling any of the servants to assist her in the operation, believing what they did not know they could never repeat to any one.
Her labors were soon rewarded by seeing Jess open her large, dark eyes slowly.
“What is it, Queenie?” she murmured, vaguely; then, in the next breath, before her companion could vouchsafe a reply, she cried bitterly: “Oh, Father in Heaven, I remember all now—the awful intelligence you brought me, that my darling husband, to whom I was to go to-morrow, is dead—killed by an awful accident! Oh, God pity me, how can I ever bear it? I had loved him so well, with all the strength of my heart and soul!”
To an enemy less relentless than the beautiful fiend who bent over her, the ghastly change in the lovely young face, looking so appealingly up into her own, would have drawn forth pity.
If she had had her own way, she would have let the girl die then and there of a broken heart; but that was not a part of the programme she had laid out for herself. It seemed that she was not to win John Dinsmore and his fortune, and her funds were running terribly low; the only way that she knew of to gain a share of the Dinsmore millions, which had slipped by her, was to aid Raymond Challoner to wed this girl, Jess, just as soon as her grief was sufficiently assuaged to allow her to be talked—even coerced—into it.
What the outcome of the affair would be she did not know or care. They would have a lively time recovering her share of the wealth, if the nefarious scheme ever came to light.