Silas Craig looked on at this heart-rending scene with an evil light shining in his red, rat-like eyes.
"For years and years, Mr. Gerald Leslie," he said, "you and the like of you have carried it with a high hand over me. But my turn has come at last, I guess. You look rather small to-day. It's a hard thing for a man to be so poor as to have to sell his favorite daughter."
"Wretch!" cried the agonized father; "this is your hour of triumph; but remember that Heaven suffers such as you to prosper for a while that it may the better confound them in the end. A being capable of infamy such as this must be capable of crime. Guilty deeds long forgotten are sometimes strangely brought to light, and it may be your turn to grovel in the dust and ask for mercy of me."
In spite of his hardihood in crime the color forsook Silas Craig's face, and left it of a dusky white. The random shot had struck him too forcibly. The man of guilt trembled.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE STORY OF PAULINE CORSI.
All things went on at the Villa Moraquitos as calmly as if nothing out of the ordinary course had happened. Camillia and her father met constantly and the Spaniard still displayed his absorbing love for his daughter; but, a few days after the scene in the gambling-house, he announced to her his intention of making Pauline Corsi his wife.
The young girl's surprise at this announcement knew no bounds. Nothing could have been more remote from her thoughts than the possibility of her father's marrying a second time.
She knew of his devotion to her mother—knew the anguish that had been caused to him by Olympia's early death, and to hear that he was about to wed the young and frivolous Frenchwoman filled her with bewilderment.
This, then, was the fulfillment of the ambitious hopes to which Pauline Corsi had alluded.