Madame Verne advanced upon her with clenched hands.
"Your hypocrisy is even more revolting than your cynicism. If I know more than one kind of tenderness? Yes. But not in a girl for a young man! You swear to me you are distressed. I swear to you something else. My boy is all I have—and I am frightened for him; I do not know what he may do in his despair. If I lose him he shall be revenged. Take care, madame de Beaulieu. If you hear of his death, take care! The very next day, if possible, or the next month, or the next year—whenever I can reach you—as Heaven is my witness, I will mark that face of yours with vitriol."
She rang the bell, and went—and the maid that entered found her mistress in a swoon upon the floor.
For a week her shattered nerves kept madame de Val Fleury abed. And for several weeks terror prevented her from setting foot outside the flat. She had a grille constructed in the door, and a hundred times she repeated to the servants that it was not to be opened for the merest instant to madame Verne, or any stranger. Such precautions could not yield composure, however. The day was rendered ghastly with false alarms; and when she glanced at the mirror, dread flared upon her now a face seared and repulsive, a mutilated, sightless thing of horror. The night brought dreams so fearful that she was, more than once, wakened by a scream that had burst from her. Thrice the awfulness of the tension impelled her to falter, through the telephone, sympathetic and ingratiating inquiries to madame Verne; and when the mother rang off without vouchsafing a reply, the poor old creature tottered with panic.
At last, towards the close of February, she had the unspeakable relief of learning that madame Verne and her son had gone to Monaco, and once again she was able to step into her car with a sense of safety. Nevertheless, the thought of the unhappiness that she had brought upon the boy was black in her mind. She tried to thrust the thought aside by reading, but fiction had lost its power to charm her. Gradually, as her health improved, she turned, for respite from her sad reflections, to the theatre. When there remained no more fashionable programmes for her to see, she would adventure the second-rate. One night, as she was coming out of a little theatre in the Montmartre quarter, she started and stopped short, trembling in every limb at a sight that met her gaze. She could not withdraw her gaze—she was magnetised by the sight; it thrilled her as if the dead had risen to her view. She was looking at the face that had been hers—she was looking at Berthe Cheron.
Berthe Cheron, handsomely dressed, had also jerked to a standstill, and for a few seconds the two fronted each other dumbly—the young girl's puckered eyes, her furrowed cheeks rancorous with regret. It was she who was the first to speak.
"Blast you!" she said.
"What do you mean—I treated you fairly, didn't I?" stammered madame de Val Fleury.
"I wish—I wish——" Resentment choked her.
"I paid all you wanted."