Mrs. Robson hastens forward, with a cry of dismay, to lift her mistress from the pillows, fearing to find her dead. But Lady Vera has not even fainted. Her white, quivering, anguished face turns upon her enemy with scorn and defiance, struggling bravely with pitiful weakness and despair. "You have almost come too late," she cries, resting against Mrs. Robson's broad shoulder, and looking at him with a strange triumph in her hollow, gleaming eyes. "Death has nearly been here before you. You have but come now to see him wrest your prey from your merciless grasp. You will have nothing but my poor, wasted body to gloat over. The soul that you have tortured out of its earthly tenement will soon be past your power." He stares at her, growing ghastly pale and alarmed. Mrs. Robson has told him that his wife is ill, that she is fretting herself to death, but he is scarcely prepared for this. It looks like death, indeed, that marble pallor, those wide and brilliant eyes that gleam upon him so weirdly, triumphing over him, even in death. A horrible sense of loss and disappointment thrills through him. Is she dying, indeed, his beautiful Vera, his rich and honored countess, the glories of whose state he has meant to share? "Vera, my darling, you must not die," he exclaims, going forward and holding out his arms to her entreatingly. "Live for me, my dearest wife. I love you more than life! Give yourself to me, Vera; let me win your heart, and I swear I will make you happy." She waves him away with a gesture of supreme loathing. In their anger and excitement no one is aware that the door has creaked softly on its hinges, that it is pushed slightly ajar now, and that two faces, lurid with jealous rage and deadly anger, are peering cautiously around it. "I love you, Vera," he repeats, undaunted by her proud scorn, sure that he must win at last. "I love you, Vera, and I have never loved but you. Thinking you dead, I was lured into that marriage with Ivy Cleveland. She turned out to be a termagant, who only cared for my money, and I hated her long before that blissful night when you, so grand and beautiful that I already adored you, not knowing who you were, boldly claimed me as your husband. You must forgive that ill-starred marriage with your cousin, my precious Vera. She and her base mother made me repent it every hour of my life. I suffered enough through them, Vera, so you ought to be kind to me." Strange that they do not hear the sibilant whisper of threatening hate that hisses through the room! But they are absorbed in their own passions, and the storm now raging at the hight of its fury has many strange sounds of its own as it surges around the ivy-mantled room. Now and then a sheet of vivid lightning illuminates the curtained windows, and a peal of terrible thunder shakes the old mansion from garret to cellar. But only Mrs. Robson has any ear or any thought for the fury of the storm.