“By your conspiracy with Camille you have driven me from you. Within an hour I leave New York. I will write you through my employers, and they will forward to me your letters.
“Norman.”
CHAPTER XXX.
It was no empty boast that Camille uttered when she threatened to haunt her husband. She meant it, and in the years that followed she made him realize her vindictive purpose many times.
It was with bitter regret that the young man had deserted his mother, but he knew that only this determined move on his part could break up the intimacy that Camille kept up with her for the selfish purpose of having her husband always under surveillance.
But, although the unhappy mother herself had no clew to her son’s whereabouts, and could only communicate with him through the medium of his employers—a great newspaper firm—Camille was more successful. Perhaps she employed a detective. Certain it was that she pursued Norman from city to city, as she had vowed she would. Whenever he believed that he had finally escaped her she turned up brilliantly beautiful as ever, defiant or humble by turns, as seemed to serve her purpose best. She found him wherever he chose to hide himself. She took possession of his apartments very often by coming in his absence and proclaiming herself his wife. She created lively scandals sometimes by her inveterate habit of falling into hysterics when Norman left her, as he invariably did, in the first moment of their meeting.
The young man was driven to despair.
He was not rich like Camille, and his small stock of money began to give out under the stress of these untoward circumstances. He could not keep his position on the New York paper which had kindly made him one of its traveling correspondents.
Camille’s persecutions began to make him a marked man. She did not suffer him to remain long enough in one place to cull satisfactory material for his journalistic letters. Disappointed love, and the fierce longing to punish Norman for his scorn, had turned beautiful Camille into a restless fiend.
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”