"This is an unexpected honor!" she said, with insolent _empressement_. "You know to what cause to attribute the honor," Pierre Carmontelle said, icily. "No," with a puzzled, inquiring tone; then, with a roguish ripple of laughter, "Ah, to congratulate me on my marriage, I suppose?" CHAPTER XLIV. "Scarcely," answered Carmontelle, dryly, for Eliot Van Zandt seemed to have no words at his command. He could only gaze in horror at the vindictive woman. The former went on curtly, and in tones of calm authority: "We are here, madame, to hear from your own lips the strange story with which you sundered two loving hearts five years ago." A sneer curled the lips of the handsome, heartless woman. "You use romantic phrases, monsieur," she said. "But true ones," he replied. "Well?" "We are waiting to hear the story you told Mr. Van Zandt's wife--the story that parted them," he answered again. She shot a quick, inquiring glance at Eliot's agitated face. "But you--you are divorced and married again, monsieur, are you not?" "No," he answered; "I shall never have any other wife but her whom you drove from me by your treachery that night." Madame was genuinely puzzled this time, for she exclaimed: "But Mrs. Bryant Van Zandt told me you hated Little Nobody, and would have married her sister Ida, only for the circumstances that forced you into a hated marriage." "It is false! I never loved Ida, nor one but the girl I made my wife!" exclaimed Eliot, indignantly; and his brother-in-law added: "He loved Una from the first time he met her here, and when she was imprisoned with him in your secret cellar, she must have died of starvation but that he opened a vein in his arm and fed the dying girl with his own blood. Does not that prove the love he had for his wife?" A bitter, ghastly change came over madame's rouged face, with a gasp, she reeled backward into a chair, and lifted her heavy eyes to Eliot's face. "You loved her like that?" she cried; "and I--oh, I believed that you hated her! I was so glad, so glad! But--yes, it is better so; my revenge is more complete, for I have made you both suffer where I believed that it was only her heart I broke!" "Fiend!" exclaimed Eliot. And Carmontelle echoed: "Fiend!" The angry woman only laughed mockingly, as she said: "Revenge is sweet! You scorned me, Eliot Van Zandt, for that slip of a girl, and now I have my pay!" And throwing back her handsome head against the silken back of her chair, she laughed low and exultantly. "We did not come here for recriminations, Madame Remond. We came, as I explained just now, to hear the story you told Una." "_Oui_, monsieur; but your friend there will be sorry when he hears it. In fact, his Una wished him never to know it," madame said, maliciously. "I have no doubt it was something very horrible, but doubtless it was an untruth. We wish to hear and judge for ourselves," was her opponent's undaunted reply.