ld win. You
remember the picture falling in the study at Isleworth. It has been a
true omen, you see."

"Angela is mad. The story is all over the country and travelling like
wild-fire. The letter you forged has been found. Heigham was down here
this morning and has gone again, and you, Lady Bellamy, are a
disgraced and ruined woman."

She did not flinch a muscle.

"I know it, it is the result of pitting myself against that girl; but
pray, Sir John, what are you? Was it not you who devised the scheme?"

"You are right, I did, to trap two fools. Anne, I have waited twenty
years, but you have met your master at last."

Lady Bellamy made a slight exclamation and relapsed into silence.

"My plot has worked well. Already one of you is dead, and for you a
fate is reserved that is worse than death. You are henceforth a
penniless outcast, left at forty-two to the tender mercies of the wide
world."

"Explain yourself a little."

"With pleasure. For years I have submitted to your contumely, longing
to be revenged, waiting to be revenged. You thought me a fool, I know,
and compared with you I am; but you do not understand what an amount
of hatred even a fool is capable of. For twenty years, Lady Bellamy, I
have hated you, you will never know how much, though perhaps what I am
going to say may give you some idea. I very well knew what terms you
were on with George Caresfoot, you never took any pains to hide them
from me, you only hid the proofs. I soon discovered indeed that your
marriage to me was nothing but a blind, that I was being used as a
screen forsooth. But your past I could never fathom. I don't look like
a revengeful man, but for all that I have for years sought many ways
to ruin you both, yet from one thing and another they all failed, till
a blessed chance made that brute's blind passion the instrument of his
own destruction, and put you into my hands. You little thought when
you told me all that story, and begged my advice, how I was revelling
in the sense that, proud woman as you are, it must have been an agony
of humiliation for you to have to tell it. It was an instructive scene
that, it assured me of what I suspected before that George Caresfoot
must have you bound to him by some stronger ties than those of
affection, that he must hold you in a grip of iron. It made me think,
too, that if by any means I could acquire the same power, I too should
be able to torture you."

For the first time Lady Bellamy