"Is that you, Miss Fielding? Do—do you want me?"
"No," Jewel said, with a contemptuous glance at the dull face, "I want Marie!"
"Oh!" said Mrs. Wellings.
"Do you know where she is?" continued Jewel, with wild impatience.
"No, I do not, I'm sure," said the only half-awakened woman. Then she started and muttered, "Oh, I forgot, she came in here soon after you went away. She was dressed for going out, and she gave me this letter to hand to you as soon as you returned," placing a sealed envelope in Jewel's eagerly outstretched palm.
Jewel was terribly afraid of the maid who held her awful secret in possession. She ran upstairs with a wildly throbbing heart, wondering what her absence and the letter combined could mean.
But she would soon know; for her nervous fingers eagerly tore the end of the envelope across, and her blazing eyes soon devoured the contents, which stated, in an odd mélange of French and English, that the writer feared to remain any longer in her employ, as she did not consider her life secure while in the power of a lady whose deadly secret she held. She had been joking about the three hundred dollars per month wages, as no sum could have been large enough to tempt her to stay. She had made arrangements to enter the service of a young English lady, and would be gone before Miss Fielding's return. Lastly, she would ease Miss Fielding's conscience by telling her that the poor girl she had flung into the cellar was not dead—only stunned—and that she, Marie, had resuscitated her and helped her away. If Miss Fielding would take the trouble to look in the cellar, she would see for herself. Lastly, Miss Fielding need not be afraid that Marie would betray her sin to the world, as she had faithfully promised the golden-haired lady that she would keep the secret.
Marie did not add that a bountiful golden bribe had bought her silence; but Jewel readily guessed it, knowing the French girl's cupidity. She tore the letter into a hundred fragments after she had impressed its contents on her furious brain, and for a few moments her wrath was something fearful—so near akin to madness that it recalled to her mind the terrible spells of her mother in those first days after she had discovered her rival's child to be blue-eyed Flower, whom she had always loved best in her secret heart, because of the two girls, she resembled her father most—the man whose memory Mrs. Fielding had alternately loved and hated.