He was about to refuse, but with her eager white hands she pushed him gently into a chair.
“Do not refuse,” she pleaded. “Once you were a very good friend of mine. Why not now? God knows I have suffered enough at my husband’s hands through your admiration for you to make me the small atonement of pitying me, of sympathizing with me in this hour.”
She flung herself into a chair opposite to him, and hurried into what she called the relation of her wrongs, and the first complaint began with the bringing of Little Sweetheart to Verelands.
“Of course I was wrong in believing the child his own, as he proved my suspicions false by marrying the girl afterward,” she admitted. “But do you not think with me, Lord Stuart, that he should have taken the child away when I requested, nay, commanded it?”
“You must excuse me for not passing judgment upon the master of Verelands under his own roof. That would be discourteous,” he said; but she noticed that he was very curious over the things she told him. He did not disdain to ask questions, and he extracted from her all the information she could impart regarding the origin of Sweetheart.
“Norman believed that the woman on the train with the child was her mother,” said Camille. “But the child, when asked, denied it. She said the woman’s name was Mattie. My own theory, Lord Stuart, was that the woman was some circus creature, and that the child had been trained to act upon the stage. She was pert and precocious for one of her age.”
When the subject of Sweetheart had been exhausted, she took up her innocent flirtation with himself.
“For these simple faults I was driven like a criminal from his heart and home,” she cried, bitterly. “Can you wonder, Lord Stuart, that, driven to madness by his scorn, I planned and carried out such a bitter revenge upon my cruel husband?”
He looked at her inquiringly; and with fiendish joy that made her appear most revolting to him, she told him all that she had done—how a pauper’s dead body had been palmed off on Norman de Vere as her own, and how in the hour of his most exquisite happiness she had struck the full cup of happiness from his lips, and driven the girl he loved away with her child into exile and misery.
He listened without one word of reply. Bad as he knew her to be, he could scarcely credit this crowning act of fiendishness.