She took it up recklessly and tore off the envelope, defying the figures to harm her; but it was not in cipher. The cold, plain, torturing words flashed before her eyes:
"Everything ready to leave the moment papers arrive. No fear of failure now.
"Stolliker."
[CHAPTER XXX.]
"No fear of failure now—no fear of failure now!"
The words danced before her eyes in living, piercing flame of scorching fire. "No fear of failure now!" and her heart just awakened to the fact that she loved this man whom she had hounded to destruction. "No fear of failure now!" What was that small, weak blundering affection she had borne Olney Winthrop compared with this maddening, anguished passion that was tearing her very soul to despair? What was that frail, misunderstood liking, that sympathy that was almost pity, to this swirling, eddying tumult of adoration that filled her breast to bursting?
And Stolliker had assured her, with a note of triumph in the words which not even the electric transmission had had power to destroy, that there was "no fear of failure now."
She had told herself in those first days that she hated him; but now she understood it all, cruelly, bitterly—understood that she had deceived herself because she had heard those hateful words of Jessica's about her birth; had heard his light laugh, and that it was a scorching, searing jealousy that had tormented her—nothing else. And now she was punished—punished!
If she had but allowed herself to acknowledge the love that Heaven had sent her, she might have saved him the crime that he had committed; and, oh, pitiful God, how well she understood that, too, now! She had loved him from the beginning—from the beginning! No other love had ever for an instant occupied her heart. And this was her punishment!
It was she who had fixed the crime upon him; she who had set the blood-hound of the law upon his track; she who had paid thousands of dollars for his conviction! And now it was too late to undo that which she had done—too late to withdraw that evidence which she would have walked blind and barefoot over the whole world to destroy.