“A child's despairing hatred because you were taking away the being she loved best of all. Will you believe me when I say that my hatred did not endure for long? When her happy, joyous letters came back to us filled with accounts of your goodness, your devotion, I allowed my hatred to die. I forgot that you had robbed me. I came to look upon you as the fairy prince, after all. It was not until she came all the way across the ocean and began to die before our eyes--she was years in dying--it was not until then that I began to hate you with a real, undying hatred.” “And yet you gave yourself to me!” he cried. “You put yourself in her place! In Heaven's name, what was to be gained by such an act as that?” “I wanted to take Matilde's boy away from you,” she hurried on, and for the first time her eyes began to waver. “The idea suggested itself to me the night I met you at the comtesse's dinner. It was a wonderful, a tremendous thought that entered my brain. At first my real self revolted, but as time went on the idea became an obsession. I married you, James Brood, for the sole purpose of hurting you in the worst possible way: by having Matilde's son strike you where the pain would be the greatest. Ah, you are thinking that I would have permitted myself to have become his mistress, but you are mistaken. I am not that bad. I would not have damned his soul in that way. I would not have betrayed my sister in that way. Far more subtle was my design. I confess that it was my plan to make him fall in love with me and in the end to run away with him, leaving you to think that the very worst had happened. But it would not have been as you think. He would have been protected, my friend, amply protected. He------” “But you would have wrecked him; don't you see that you would have wrecked the life you sought to protect? How blind and unfeeling you were. You say that he was my son and Matilde's, honestly born. What was your object, may I inquire, in striking me at such cost to him? You would have made a scoundrel of him for the sake of a personal vengeance. Are you forgetting that he regarded himself as my son?” “No; I do not forget, James. There was but one way in which I could hope to steal him away from you, and I went about it deliberately, with my eyes open. I came here to induce him to run away with me. I would have taken him back to his mother's home, to her grave, and there I would have told him what you did to her. If, after hearing my story, he elected to return to the man who had destroyed his mother, I should have stepped aside and offered no protest.