It was well that they were alone in the car, for Kathleen's excitement was terrible. Her eyes blazed, her cheeks paled, her heart beat violently against her side.
"Uncle Ben, I am speaking of that woman who so unworthily took my dead mother's place!" she exclaimed. "Yes, she is a fiend! She to pretend that she loved the memory of the woman she goaded to madness—perhaps murdered; for no one saw my poor young mother drive the fatal steel into her heart. Oh, God! what deceit—what treachery!"
He grasped her wrist with steely fingers, his eyes flashed with a fire akin to hers, and he whispered;
"Hush! You must not dare accuse her so! You drive me mad! Oh, it can not be!"
"You take that false woman's part, then, Uncle Ben, against me and my poor young mother? Listen, then; let me tell you all I know—a secret I kept from my dead father, because I believed in him, trusted him, in spite of the servants' gossip that accused him of complicity in his young wife's death."
"They dared, the hounds! accuse m-my brother thus?" he breathed, fiercely, the perspiration starting out on his brow, his strong frame trembling.
"Yes, they accused him," answered the girl. "Do not take it so hard, Uncle Ben. He was innocent, I know; but that fiendish woman played her part to perfection. She made my mother believe that Vincent Carew wished her out of the way, so that he might wed her, the traitress! She made the servants believe the same. She even plotted——" But suddenly the girl paused with clasped hands. "Oh! uncle, dear, it will wound you if I mention this; it will blacken my father's memory in your eyes—and I always loved him—I love him still, in spite of what he has done to me, and I ought to spare him."
"Go on, Kathleen. I command you to tell me everything. I have a sacred right to know," commanded the agitated man by her side.
"Listen, then, dear uncle: Just a few months before my father went away on that foreign tour, from which he never returned alive, I received a message from an old woman calling me to her death-bed in the suburbs of the city. I went, taking my maid with me. In a secret interview that followed the dying woman told me she had been housekeeper at the Carew mansion in my mother's time. She could not die easy without revealing to me a secret she had carried untold for sixteen years."