[CHAPTER XLVIII.]
EVERY WOMANLY IMPULSE IN HER NATURE CRIED OUT AGAINST SUCH A CRUEL WRONG.
"The villain who foully abused her,
Though the husband to whom she was wed,
After pledging his heart and his hand,
Like a monster reviled and abused her,
And she died in a far away land."
Francis S. Smith.
"You are in luck, my boy," chuckled Clifford Standish, to himself.
He had just read in a New York newspaper of the death of his deserted wife.
No pity stirred his cruel heart as his eye ran over the few paragraphs that told him in a sensational manner of the cause of her death.
Deserted by her husband, in ill-health, and unable to work, penniless, friendless, the unhappy woman had frozen to death in a miserable attic-room during the prevalence of a terrible blizzard.
He was guilty of her death, he knew, yet not one twinge of remorse tore his cruel heart for the fate to which he had consigned that true and tender wife.