“My mistress sends you dis lettaire,” she said; and as Norman took the scented envelope into his hand she flounced out of the room.
Norman tore off the covering of the letter and began to read.
His mother sat waiting anxiously. She guessed that Camille had sent some passionate petition for pity and pardon to the husband she loved. She prayed silently that it would melt his heart.
Mrs. de Vere was a proud woman. She could not endure to think of the notoriety that must inevitably attend upon her son’s divorce. She pitied Camille, whose caprices had brought her to this shameful pass.
She saw a tempest of emotion sweep over Norman’s darkly handsome face. It grew alternately pale and crimson, the lips worked with passion, the dark eyes shot gleams of fire.
He finished at last, and flung the letter into his mother’s lap.
CHAPTER XXII.
Camille had written from the dictation of the infamous French maid. She had alternately implored and threatened, vowing that Norman’s little protégée should serve her turn to point an infamous charge against him if he persevered in his resolve to procure a divorce.
The delicate cheek of the matron flushed indignantly as her dark eyes traveled over the paper. Meanwhile, the observant child had secured the envelope, which had fluttered to the floor, and sitting down, she cut it into bits with her tiny scissors. She waited silently but patiently for the letter, turning her blue eyes with bird-like eagerness toward the reader. When at last Mrs. de Vere finished and handed it back to her son, and he crumpled it in his hand and flung it disdainfully from him, Sweetheart pounced upon it unnoticed and sat down to destroy it with the aid of her little scissors.
She spread out the pretty pink sheet, but the delicate fragrance exhaling from it arrested her olfactories, and after holding it pensively to her nose a moment, she concluded not to immolate it yet; so, quite unobserved by her elders, she crossed the room to her box of toys, and hid Camille’s letter among the leaves of a picture-book.