alite, white with dread.

"They are no proofs of anything; but I will tell you what he was writing
of. Two days after the scene at the All Faith Church, while your father
and your cousin were both out, that outlying brigand seized the
opportunity for which he had been watching, and came in here to see and
threaten me."

"Oh, mother, dear mother!" said Odalite, in tender compassion.

"Never mind, my child. He is away now, thank Heaven! His talk to me was
all of a piece with his letters to you. That is enough to say about
it--except that, during the interview, he told me something that I believe
to be a mere tissue of falsehoods."

"And what was that, mamma?"

"He told me--think of the audacity and shamelessness of such an
avowal!--he told me that at the time he married the Widow Wright, at St.
Sebastian, he had a wife living in London."

"Oh, mother!" said Odalite, with a low cry of horror.

"To prove it, he took a slip of paper from his pocketbook, which he said
was cut from the London _Times_, and which he said that he had received
while staying at Niagara with us. It was, in fact, the notice of the death
of his wife, and, if I remember rightly, it ran something like this:

"'Died.--Suddenly, at Anglewood Manor, on August twenty-fifth, in the
forty-ninth year of her age, Lady Mary, eldest daughter of the late and
sister of the present Earl of Middlemoor, and wife of Col. the Hon. Angus
Anglesea, late of the H.E.I.C.S.'

"There, Odalite, I have tried to reproduce from memory the proof that he
produced to establish as facts that his first wife was living at the time
of his marriage with the Widow Wright, which was, consequently, not
binding, and that she died some months before his marriage with yourself,
which is, according to him, lawful and binding."

"Oh, mother--mother! There seems to be no doubt of it!" wailed Odalite,
throwing her arms over the table and dropping her head upon it in a sudden
collapse of despair.

"Even if there were no doubt about the matter--even if he has a legal
claim upon you--it is not a moral or Christian one, but a technicality
which your father will never admit, even if that man should dare to come
back and urge it."

"But, oh, mother, he will come back, some time, when he thinks the danger
past, and he will put the screws upon you and me as he did before! He will
make me declare that my happiness depends upon my reunion to him, my
'legal husband.' He will make you plead with