“My God, again!” he cried, hoarsely.
“My place is here. You shall not drive me from you again,” the beautiful creature cried, half pleadingly, half stormily; but she shrunk and cowered at last before his lightning glance of scorn.
“Have you no shame?” he cried. “Can you force your presence thus on a man who loathes you? Listen, then: I will bear this persecution no longer. I threatened you with divorce once, but you begged to be spared this disgrace; you preferred, you said, to go quietly away and fade out of my life. You have broken your promise. That absolves me from mine. To-morrow I shall institute proceedings for a divorce. I will obtain it, even if to gain the suit I have to betray my full knowledge of your wickedness—your foul murder of the man who held some guilty secret in your past life!”
“Hush, for Heaven’s sake! You may be overheard!” she faltered, cowering down beside the bed in her white robes, with a look of guilty terror in her burning eyes; but he gazed at her unmoved.
“What does it matter?” he said, hoarsely. “Every one must know it when the case goes to court, for I swear I will dally no longer. I will free my life from your claim, despite the bitter cost.”
“It will be a bitter contest, then, for I will fight you to the last gasp! You have earned my hate and you shall know its power!” she cried malevolently; but he stayed to hear no more. Bowing coldly, he quitted the room, and a little later two disguised women glided stealthily down the stairway, and emerging into the street, lost themselves in the lights and windows of the great city. They were Finette and her baffled mistress.
“He has threatened me again with divorce, Finette. I can not bear it. Think of some plan to stave it off. My God! I can not live under such humiliation!” Camille breathed hoarsely, and Finette saw that she was on the verge of hysteria. She began to reassure her at once, promising that she would think of some plan by to-morrow by which to thwart Norman de Vere’s purpose.
Three days later Finette Du Val made her appearance in Norman de Vere’s study with a pale, grief-stricken countenance, and announced that her mistress had committed suicide.
“She threatened yesterday that she would do it rather than bear the shame and grief of a divorce, but I did not believe her. Poor thing, she had said it so often before I thought it was nothing but talk. But when I went to call her this morning, she lay dead, with the bottle of poison by her side,” was the plausible story she told.
Norman de Vere was shocked at the awful closing of Camille’s guilty life. He went with Finette to look at the corpse, and spent some solemn moments gazing into the cold white face of the woman he had loved so well before he found her out in her terrible sin. She was changed and altered very much from the effects of the poison, but the beautiful, wavy red hair was the same, and no suspicion came to Norman that he had been made the victim of a clever trick by the crafty maid. The corpse was buried quietly in Greenwood, but with all due attention. Norman and his mother going as chief mourners; and very soon a tasteful monument marked the last resting-place of the dead woman.