"Jewel, I should like to see this man! I should like to hear from his own lips—"
Jewel recoiled in horror.
"You are mad!" she cried. "Do you think I would permit it, that I would own you, the half-sister whose kinship to me is her disgrace and a brand on the memory of my dead father?"
She turned her back on the poor girl with a disdainful gesture, and swept toward the fire, and stood there with her pretty pointed slipper on the fender, murderous thoughts rising in her heart.
"I could kill her, I hate and fear her so much!" she thought, hotly.
Flower's tear-wet eyes had fallen to the floor. They fastened on an envelope lying close to her feet half under the folds of her dress. She saw the name of her sister on the upper side.
She did not feel much interest in the letter. She could not understand afterward, when she came to think of it soberly, why she had picked it up and hid it in her breast.
[CHAPTER XXXII.]
Jewel moved from her position in front of the fire, and trailed the beautiful folds of her purple velvet dress across the floor to the window.