Thea started, and a strange light came into her eyes.
As though she had held the book of her life in her hands and the warm leaves had fluttered apart at the opening pages, the past had rushed over her mind, so slight are the tokens needed to revive a sleeping memory.
Thea felt herself again a child, so vivid was her recollection of the moment when she had picked up from the floor the crumpled letter Norman had cast aside, and hidden it with the scissors in the book for future clipping. Then, child-like, she had forgotten all about it.
“What is it, anyway?” she thought, idly straightening the sheet out on her knee and regarding the delicate feminine letters with curious eyes.
No thought came to the happy young wife that it could be wrong to read the letter tossed aside so carelessly and forgotten so long. She saw that the heading was simply “My husband,” but for the moment no thought came to her of Norman’s first wife. She had read more than half, before, with a startled cry, she glanced at the end of the letter and read there the name Camille.
But she could not pause now. She read on with dilated eyes until she had mastered the whole of Camille’s cruel defiance. Her jealous, angry spirit had not spared her husband the bitterest taunts. Let him but dare, she wrote, institute proceedings for a divorce, and she would tell the whole world what a monster he was, bringing under her roof his illegitimate child and trying to deceive her and the world with the story that it was a stranger whom he had saved in a railway wreck.
CHAPTER LIV.
Thea sat staring at that cruel letter like one dazed. Her cheeks went pale, then crimson, with an overpowering sense of shame.
Hitherto she had cherished a profound pity for the unhappy woman who, having been fortunate enough to win Norman de Vere’s heart, had been too weak to hold it; now, a burning indignation against the dead woman heaved in her breast. How had she dared wound him with that false and hateful accusation—he, her hero, her king?
“Oh, my love, my darling, you bore this for my sake! I understand now why there was no divorce,” she murmured; and her beautiful eyes filled with tears—the hot tears of a woman’s love and sorrow—although she looked scarcely more than a child sitting there with the box of toys, her long curls, still worn child-fashion, falling about her shoulders like a veil of sunshine.