“How strange, dear, it seems to see your child sitting there with its toys at play,” cried grandmamma, smilingly. “Why, it seems but yesterday that you were a child at play yourself, and Norman bringing you new toys every day. On a shelf in my closet now there is a great box of your broken dolls and playthings.” “Oh, I must look at them some time,” Thea cried, with almost childish delight at the thought; and the very next day she had her maid lug in the big box to her room and leave it on the floor. Alan was out in the grounds with his nurse, Norman was at his desk in the library, Mrs. de Vere was directing the maids about some housework. Thea thought it would be a good time to look over the store of toys Norman had given her. Norman--yes, that was the charm--had loved her in her innocent childhood--had selected these toys for her with his own hands. There was a thought of him in every headless doll, every piece of battered doll furniture, every dog’s-eared book with gayly painted pictures, and the fond heart thrilled with tender thoughts of him. “My own, own love, my darling who loves me so!” murmured the beautiful red lips; and pausing for a moment in a happy dream, she absently turned the leaves of a torn picture-book. Ah, what was that that fell out from between the leaves?--a crumpled letter, a little pair of stub-pointed scissors. Thea started, and a strange light came into her eyes. As though she had held the book of her life in her hands and the warm leaves had fluttered apart at the opening pages, the past had rushed over her mind, so slight are the tokens needed to revive a sleeping memory. Thea felt herself again a child, so vivid was her recollection of the moment when she had picked up from the floor the crumpled letter Norman had cast aside, and hidden it with the scissors in the book for future clipping. Then, child-like, she had forgotten all about it. “What is it, anyway?” she thought, idly straightening the sheet out on her knee and regarding the delicate feminine letters with curious eyes. No thought came to the happy young wife that it could be wrong to read the letter tossed aside so carelessly and forgotten so long. She saw that the heading was simply “My husband,” but for the moment no thought came to her of Norman’s first wife. She had read more than half, before, with a startled cry, she glanced at the end of the letter and read there the name Camille. But she could not pause now. She read on with dilated eyes until she had mastered the whole of Camille’s cruel defiance. Her jealous, angry spirit had not spared her husband the bitterest taunts. Let him but dare, she wrote, institute proceedings for a divorce, and she would tell the whole world what a monster he was, bringing under her roof his illegitimate child and trying to deceive her and the world with the story that it was a stranger whom he had saved in a railway wreck. CHAPTER LIV.