"Dead!" repeated Wallace, wonderingly, his hitherto inflexible face softening a trifle. "Oh, say it again—does Violet really believe that I am dead?" and the eager, quivering tones rang sharply through the room.
"Yes, she believes so; it was so announced in one of the American papers," Lord Cameron replied, with something more of composure, but never losing that first look of horror.
Like a flash Wallace wheeled about and faced Wilhelm Mencke and his trembling wife.
"Then that was some more of your miserable work!" he cried, in a terrible voice, "a diabolical plot to separate us. From the first you have left nothing undone to part us, and so, when all else failed, you reported me dead, knowing well that she would never marry another while she believed me to be living. Oh! I see it all now, and my love, my love, I have wronged you!" he concluded, in a tone of anguish.
When he had turned with such fiery denunciation upon them, Mrs. Mencke shrank from him with such an expression of awe, fear, and guilt upon her face, that she was instantly self-condemned; every one in the room was as sure that she had caused that lying paragraph, announcing Wallace's death, to be inserted in the paper to mislead Violet, as if she had openly confessed it.
"Did you do it—did you drive that poor child thus to promise to become my wife?" demanded Lord Cameron, in a voice that was like the ominous calm before a tempest.
The woman was speechless; but her guilty eyes drooped beneath his stern look, for she knew that her miserable secret was revealed.
"You do not know what you have done," Wallace cried, growing wild again, "but you will pay dearly for your treachery—ha! ha! you little dream how dearly it will cost you, when the consequences of your wretched plot shall be noised abroad from the aristocratic summit upon which you have hitherto so proudly stood, and from which you will soon be ruthlessly hurled."
Wilhelm Mencke, having by this time begun to recover somewhat from the shock of Wallace's unexpected appearance, commenced to bluster:
"Look here, you young upstart," he cried, growing very red in the face, and assuming a threatening attitude, "all these charges and accusations may or may not be true—we won't discuss that point just now; but whether it is or not, it can be no possible concern of yours. I should like to know what you mean by bursting in upon respectable people in this rude way. What was Violet to you?—what right or business have you to interfere with whatever she might have chosen to do?"