“Fiend!” he said, hoarsely, “you have been the prime mover in this hellish plot, by which I was made to believe yonder woman dead. But you shall no longer escape punishment for your wickedness. I will denounce you both to the authorities, and you will find that Nemesis has overtaken your wrong-doing at last!” Finette looked at him, a little startled by the threat, but answered, recklessly: “I have done no more than my mistress bid me. Her will has always been my law.” “Do not think to place her between us as a shield for your wickedness, cowardly wretch! I shall spare neither of you now, and my vengeance will recoil in most terrible fashion upon your heads!” A stifled shriek came from the sofa. Camille glared in fury at him. “You can not divorce me!” she cried, exultantly. “You have no cause. I can prove by Finette that I have been willing and anxious to return to you ever since you sent me away, but you would not permit it. I will fight the application for divorce every step. I will hold you apart forever from the doll-faced girl that stole your heart from me!” She laughed aloud at the spasm of bitter agony that convulsed his features at the thought of Sweetheart and of all the woe this fiendish woman had brought on her and little Alan, her darling. At the echo of her fiendish merriment the last vestige of pity faded from his heart and left in its place only a keen thirst for revenge upon the demoniac creature who had so cruelly desolated his life even while with the most noble forbearance he had kept his lips sealed upon the hideous secret of her crime. He glanced at Finette, who stood apart, angry, yet alarmed in spite of herself at his strange threats; then he answered Camille in low, hoarse accents of determination: “I shall make no application for a divorce. The dark secret of your past, which I have mercifully kept so long, shall now be given to the world, and to the verdict of a jury I look for final release from the fetters that cursed my boyhood and manhood--the fetters of a mature siren whose smiles hid a shameful past. But the veil shall be torn away at last, and the world shall know you as you are, murderess! The vengeance I scorned to take for myself, I take for my outraged wife and child!” Camille cowered under the flash of his eyes, but she did not yet believe he would betray her crime to the world. “Wife and child!” she uttered, scornfully; and some epithets fell from her lips that made him turn deathly white with fury. “Were you a man, you should not live to repeat those words!” he warned her, bitterly; and then he turned to Finette, who, ever since the utterance of that word murderess by his lips, had stood quaking with fear and astonishment. “Where are they--my wife and child?” he asked, sternly. “They went away the morning after we came,” sullenly. “After you two had poured your poisonous story into her ears?”