Lord Stuart heard the faltering question and the insolent reply. He turned to Camille.
“I think you will go quietly away, so that the law will not touch you. Am I right?” he said.
“Yes, I will go,” she said, with a shudder. “Come, Finette, you must pack my things.”
She dragged herself up from her chair and made an unsteady movement toward the door, cowed at last by the fate that lowered above her head. To be shut up alone in prison, away from Finette, the only friend she had left on earth; to see night and day the mocking face of her murdered husband grinning in the awful solitude—why, it was too horrible to contemplate. She was ready to crawl in the dust at Lord Stuart’s feet to avoid her threatening fate.
“I will go,” she muttered, abjectly again, as she strove to move; but just then she caught sight of something that still had power to turn the blood in her veins to liquid fire.
Thea had lifted her golden head at last from her mother’s breast, and Norman, who had watched most eagerly for that moment, had hastened to infold his darling in his yearning arms.
Camille’s abject submission gave way at that torturing sight. She forgot everything but her rage at the reunion of those two she had tried most eagerly and wickedly to put asunder. She threw up her arms, and, with maddening shrieks, fell writhing upon the floor.
Dr. Hinton hastened to her assistance, and said, a minute later:
“It is an attack of hysteria. I think, if you will all adjourn to the library, I can assist her maid to bring her around quicker.”
They went gladly enough, and presently Camille was far enough recovered to go upstairs to dress for her final departure from Verelands.