Blank silence and darkness greeted him, and a deadly chill struck to his heart.
“Oh, Heaven! not dead—my little Alan dead!” he groaned, in sudden anguish; but it lasted only a moment, for another thought came to him.
“Sweetheart, dear baby that she is, has converted her own room into a nursery in my absence, that she may have her little idol always with her. I shall find them there.”
And turning from the dreary darkened room, he went along the hall with rapid steps to the suite of rooms that had once been occupied by the beautiful Camille, and later on had been refitted and refurnished for Sweetheart when she became his happy bride.
In the subdued light that filtered softly through frosted gas-globes in the hall, he paused, and bending down, listened at her door for the sound of voices.
A low, smothered murmur greeted his ears, and he could no longer restrain his impatience. He opened the door, and stepped quickly over the threshold.
And to the day of his death he always wondered why the sight that met his eyes did not strike him dead as swiftly as if it had been a bolt of the most terrible lightning.
There in Sweetheart’s sacred boudoir, from among the dainty furnishings of blue and gold framed to shrine her fair and youthful beauty, there glared upon him two darker faces, both distorted by fiendish triumph—the face of Camille, beautiful still in an artificial way, breathing, living, and behind her Finette—the artful maid.
CHAPTER LX.
Camille began to tremble with nervous excitement when she beheld the man she had wronged so cruelly, but she rose immediately and made a step toward him, crying out in a tone that was half pleading, half defiant: