A few moments
were wasted upon trifling with a well-worn envelope, now carefully
hidden in her bosom. This maneuver passed the time needed for
a stately carriage to sweep up from the opened grand gate of the
bungalow to the raised veranda steps. "There he is!" she grimly
said. "Now, for the first blood!"
A man who was shaking with mingled rage and fear hastily strode
across the broad portico, as Berthe Louison glided away from the
curtained window and confidently resumed her own chosen chair. Her
bosom was heaving, her eye was fixed and stern, and she steadily
awaited her foe, for one last warning whisper had reached her hidden
servitor.
When Marie Victor threw open the double doors of the reception
room, on its threshold stood the towering form of the man whom
Alixe Delavigne had known in other years as Hugh Fraser, the man
whose pallid face told her that he knew at last that he was under
the sword of Damocles! Clad in white linen, his sun helmet in his
hand, steadying himself with a jeweled bamboo crutch-handled stick,
the old Anglo-Indian waited until Berthe Louison's voice rang out,
as clear as a silver bell: "Marie! I am not to be interrupted."
she calmly said. "You may wait beyond, in the ante-room!"
The woman who had emerged from the dark penumbra of a dead Past,
to torture the embryo Baronet, gazed silently at the stern old man
glowering there.
Striding up to her, the insolent habit of years was, strong upon
him, as he hoarsely said: "What juggling fiend of hell brings you
here?"
Without a tremor in her voice, the lady of Jitomir replied:
"I came here to undo the work of years! To teach an orphaned girl
to know that a love which hallows and which blesses, can reach her
from the grave in which your cold brutality buried the only being
I ever loved! She shall know her mother, from my lips, and not
wither in the gray hell of your egoism.
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