"She shook the papers in my face, and laughed at my look of fear and astonishment. To finish my agony, when I began to talk something about the rights of an English wife, she coolly told me that she had just as good a right to my husband as I had, for he had one wife when I married him, and that rendered my marriage a nullity. What a shock for a wife--to hear that she is no wife, or if she is, the wife of a robber, adulterer, and murderer. "I heard all this with a sort of indifference foreign to my very nature. It was well that I did, for it enabled me to perfect my plans, and carry them out with a degree of coolness worthy of a better purpose. I had been promising for some time to visit a friend for a week, and I set about packing up for the journey at once. I said not one word to De Vrai of what I heard, nor gave him one look of reproof. Fortune had made me acquainted with the secret hiding-place of the money this guilty pair had obtained from their poor victim, and I did not feel any compunctions of conscience in taking it from them. In three days afterwards I was in Paris. Here I lived a few months a wretched life of dissipation, and then De Vrai, tracked me to my hiding-place and I had to fly once more; this time across the ocean. "I had five hundred dollars when I arrived in this city. What might I not have done with that sum, if I had used it prudently? What I did do, I must tell, that it may be a warning to others. It would be a source of consolation to me if I knew that the follies of my life could be illuminated and set up as a beacon light to my fellow creatures, to save them from the quicksands of dissipation upon which I have been wrecked--wrecked by my own folly and foolish pride.