“However, they had not been married many months when a fierce quarrel arose between our husbands. It was about some money matters. I never fully understood it, but I then learned for the first time that it was more Pansy’s little fortune Adrian wanted than herself, and that Monsieur Le Conte’s influence was used in his favor because they had agreed that in that way he should cancel a debt owed to Adrian. Had I known this I would never have let them use me as their tool.”
“And he was my father!” murmured Ethel in a pained tone.
“Yes, child, and you might justly hate me for giving you such a one!” exclaimed the Madame almost passionately. “I’m afraid he was a bad man. I fear he was unkind to my sister; but she was loyal to him, poor thing.
“When the quarrel arose between him and Monsieur Le Conte I sided with my husband, and went to Ethel with his version of the affair; but she would not listen to me.
“‘I am his wife now,’ she said; ‘I will hear nothing against him. And you, Nannette, who brought about the match, should be the last to tempt me to do so.’
“I was very angry, and heaped bitter reproaches upon her,” pursued the Madame, almost overcome by emotion. “She heard them in grieved silence, which somehow only exasperated me the more, and I said still harder and more cruel words. And so I left her.”
For some minutes the room was filled with the sound of the Madame’s sobs, and Ethel wept with her.
“It was our last interview,” she began again in a broken voice. “A few days later her husband spirited her away no one knew whither, and from that day to this I have never heard a word from her or about her, except what I have learned through you—her child.
“I have now told you of my crime; I have yet to tell of its punishment. In spite of all my unkindness, I loved my sister; how dearly I never guessed till she was gone. I was nearly frantic at her loss, and at the thought of my last words to her.
“The world went prosperously with us so far as money was concerned. My husband invested my little fortune and his own partly in an oil-well, partly in a gold-mine in California, and we were wonderfully successful in both. But we were not happy. Remorse and anxiety about Pansy made me wretched and robbed me of my vivacity and my bloom. I grew dull and spiritless, and my husband began to neglect me and to seek the society of other women, whom, as he said, he found more entertaining.