ad
chosen as her own peculiar fortification. 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. I have searched the world over, and found you, at last,
together!"

"By God! You shall never even see her face, you she-devil!" cried the
infuriated old man, nearing the defiant woman. "You were the go-between
for your worthless sister and that Russian cur, Troubetskoi!"

"You lie! Hugh Fraser, you lie!" cried Berthe, in a ringing voice. "You
crushed the flower that Fate had drifted within your reach! You turned
her into the streets of London to starve! You robbed her of her child,
all this to feed your own flinty-hearted