But even as she spoke she turned slightly pale, and added:
“Oh, it doesn’t matter where it was found so that I have it back. What a fuss we are all making over a bit of lace!”
“You made fuss enough yourself when it was lost at Bonair!” cried Marie, sharply, while they all fell to watching Berenice, who was putting in the torn lace with neat little stitches, though her hands shook sadly, so that she said:
“I am making a poor job of it, Miss Montague, but you can get a real lace maker to do it over again for you. You see, it makes me so nervous just thinking of the night when I found this scrap of lace, and of all I suffered afterward.”
“Try not to think of it at all,” soothingly said Rosalind, but Berenice raised her dark eyes, swimming in tears, and murmured:
“I must think of it, for it is my duty to tell everything I know about that night.”
“Go on, I am sure it will be very interesting,” exclaimed Clarence Carlisle, Marie’s husband.
“I needn’t tell about that night when I was pushed into the bear pit,” continued Berenice, “for all that are here have heard the story over and over, but some things that I never told before I mean to betray now, and one is that the pretended Indian seeress was no Indian at all, but a disguised and jealous enemy of mine, who desired to compass my death. I am sure of it, for in our struggle on the edge of the pit the woman uttered some angry words, in her own voice, which I instantly recognized. Then I clutched at her, and as I fell I knew I had something clutched in my frantic grasp that I had torn from her gown. It was this piece of lace that Mrs. Cline, simple soul, not dreaming of the mute witness it bore against my would-be murderer, disentangled from my unconscious fingers and kept for me. But it did not need this mute witness for me, for as I fell I saw my enemy’s face and heard her taunting voice, and I knew you, Miss Montague, for what you were, a guilty sinner, wreaking a terrible revenge on a hapless rival. Then when Charley sprang down to my rescue, you flew back and tried to destroy him also by a cowardly bullet, for the Clines saw the white figure running away from the scene of the double crime.”
She heard low, startled cries all around her, and lifting her accusing eyes she looked at Rosalind.
Out of her dead-white face her blue eyes glared like two points of steel, with murder in their gleam, and from between her stiff, white lips came bleakly: