She had taken the greatest pains to hide her enmity to her sister. There was no one who could say she had been unkind to Flower; Laurie Meredith should never know otherwise, and from her reputed tenderness to his dead wife, and her sweet sympathy with himself, should spring up another flower of love that should bloom for her alone. Some day she would be his wife, and the secret of all she had done to part him from Flower should be buried forever in the poor girl's grave.
She could see nothing to mar the success of her far-reaching plans. With Flower dead, and her mother the inmate of an insane asylum, she would be her own mistress, with quite a handsome fortune at her command, and she intended to make capital of her liberty and her position.
True, the physician had said that her mother's reason would most probably return within a few months, but Jewel had made up her mind that the foolish, half-mad creature should never leave the asylum again. For so young a girl she was wonderfully clever and headstrong, and she was fully determined to have her own way.
With all these thoughts in her mind she stood watching Flower reading those few brief lines, and she was not surprised when with one low cry of anguish the unhappy girl let the paper slip from her nerveless hands, and fell back in a heavy swoon upon the pillow.
Jewel laughed as she looked at the still, white face, and moved toward the door.
"I will walk up and down the hall and get some fresh air while she recovers at her leisure," she said, aloud; and she stepped outside and went to the hall window, which was open, letting in a flood of balmy air, sweet with the heavy scent of the early blooming lilacs.
She leaned her elbows on the window-ledge and looked out at the beautiful tides of the sea rolling into the shore with a hollow murmur, while the moon's bright rays made silver paths across the restless waves. But Jewel shivered, and exclaimed:
"But for him I should be dead, drowned in that cruel sea! He saved my life, and I dedicated it to him. I made him the king of my heart! Oh, why did she come between us? If I am wicked it is all her fault. She drove me mad."
Absorbed in her angry self-excuses, it was almost half an hour before she returned to the room she had left, and then she found Flower lying just as she had left her, cold and apparently rigid, with no movement at her heart.
Jewel could not repress a low cry of horror. She was only a girl, and wicked as she was, she was frightened when she saw that life had fled from the body of her she had so cruelly tortured.