“And it is as red as ever!” her mistress interrupted, impatiently. “Don’t try to flatter me, Finette. I am not vain, whatever other faults I may possess. I know my hair is red, my mouth too wide, my skin too pale. I know, too, that I always had some fascinations for men, despite my lack of beauty. But what matter! I am despised by the only man I wish to charm. As for you, Finette, you are a wicked fraud! You promised I should have him back. You lied. It is eleven years, and I am no nearer him than when he cast me off,” she raved, passionately.
Finette raised sullen, defiant eyes to the angry face.
“It is your own fault that I deceived you. You did not tell me all—you kept back things far worse than you confessed, else he could not have held out against all your devotion and—persecution,” she said, boldly.
“How dare you!” her mistress cried; but she quailed as with terror. “I told you everything,” she said, after a minute, defiantly.
“I do not believe you,” Finette muttered, sulkily; and for some minutes the war of words raged fiercely between them, for in their long years together their respective positions were often forgotten or ignored.
The day came when to her joy Camille found out her husband’s hiding-place. It was in New York where he had settled again with his mother on their return from abroad. She knew that he must be prospering, because only a few weeks ago her lawyer had made to her the last payment due to her on the improvements at Verelands.
“Why, it was ten thousand dollars! He must be rich,” Camille cried.
She and Finette consulted again, and the result was a plan more daring than any that had gone before.
There came a night when Norman de Vere awakened from a kind of nightmare dream and struggled for breath in the clasp of warm, round arms with passionate lips clinging tight to his.
At first he thought it was a dream, for once such dreams had visited his pillow, but soon he realized that it was fact. Struggling from the clasp that would have held him, but was too weak, he lighted the gas and saw with a shudder, the Nemesis of his life.