out this
woebegone spot in mid Arizona, the more he realized the influence for
evil that handmaid of Shaitan seemed to exert over his vain, shallow,
yet beautiful and beloved wife. Against it he had wrought and pleaded
in vain. Elise had been with them since her babyhood, was his wife's
almost indignant reply. Elise had been faithful to her--devoted to her
all her life. Elise was indispensable; the only being that kept her
from going mad with home-sickness and misery in that God-forsaken
clime. Sobs and tears wound up each interview and, like many a
stronger man, Plume had succumbed. It might, indeed, be cruel to rob
her of Elise, the last living link that bound her to the blessed
memories of her childhood, and he only mildly strove to point out to
her how oddly, yet persistently, her good name had suffered through
the words and deeds of this flighty, melodramatic Frenchwoman.
Something of her baleful influence he had seen and suspected before
ever they came to their exile, but here at Sandy, with full force he
realized the extent of her machinations. Clarice was not the woman to
go prowling about the quarters in the dead hours of the night, no
matter how nervous and sleepless at home. Clarice was not the woman to
be having back-door conferences with the servants of other households,
much less the "striker" of an officer with whose name hers, as a
maiden, had once been linked. He recalled with a shudder the events of
the night that sent the soldier Mullins to hospital, robbed of his
wits, if not of his life. He recalled with dread the reluctant
admissions of the doctor and of Captain Wren. Sleep-walking, indeed!
Clarice never elsewhere at any time had shown somnambulistic symptoms.
It was Elise beyond doubt who had lured her forth for some purpose he
could neither foil nor fathom. It was Elise who kept up this
discreditable and mysterious commerce with Downs,--something that had
culminated in the burning of Blakely's home, with who knows what
evidence,--something that had terminated only with Downs's mad
desertion and probable death. All this and more went flashing through
his mind as Miss Wren finished her brief and significant story, and it
dawned upon him that, whatever it might be to others, the death of
Downs--to him, and to her whom he loved and whose honor he
cherished--was anything but a calamity, a thing to mourn. Too
generous to say the words, he yet turned with lightened heart and met
Byrne's searching eyes,