“And very sensible in them, too,” Finette muttered. She rose suddenly to her feet. “I’ll follow their example, and let you go to the gallows by yourself, miladi,” she said, heartlessly. But Camille clutched her skirts with a shriek, as she turned to go. “Stay with me, Finette, and I will make you rich,” she cried, pleadingly. “You shall have another one of those uncut gems--that great emerald that cost me many thousands. Only stay with me! You are the only friend I have in the wide world!” hysterically. “You may thank your own folly for that,” the maid said, bluntly. “You are a she-devil, if ever I saw one, and I don’t know as even that emerald will tempt me to stay long with you unless you try to be more agreeable,” insolently. CHAPTER LXI. Yes, Sweetheart had gone away from Verelands, where she had been so unutterably happy, and where such blighting sorrow and disgrace had fallen upon her life. She had not waited to be thrust out-of-doors by the hands of her vindictive foe; she had gone herself, creeping forth with bowed head and unsteady steps at the earliest dawn of day. In her arms she carried her sleeping child; but she did not go to the river, as Camille ardently hoped she would; and the fear of such a tragedy was soon dissipated in Norman’s mind by the reception of a letter which Sweetheart had left for him with one of the servants--a letter scrawled in a trembling hand, barely like her own, so terrible was her agitation. Sweetheart had written it upon her knees, being so weak that she could not sit upright to pen the incoherent lines to the man of whom she was taking so bitter a farewell. In it she had inclosed her unfinished verses, and Norman read them through a mist of tears, the bitterest he had ever shed in his shadowed life. “This is what I was writing, when she--your wife, whom we thought dead--came back and set the seal of shame and despair on the short story of my life: “’Tis midnight, my darling, the house is so lonely-- All, all are asleep but me; I waken to weep, ah, beloved, if only-- If only I were with thee! But the swift hours are bearing thee further away, The swift hours whose flight my poor heart can not stay; Come back to me, darling, my eager heart cries, And the bitter tears rush from my heart to my eyes.” “You see, Norman, I was feeling very, very unhappy over your absence. It must have been a presentiment of evil. When she first said that she was your wife, I could not believe it. But when Nurse Mary came home from the party, I told her all. She had seen your wife when she lived at Verelands long ago. She went upstairs and looked at the two women, and she came back to me weeping. She had recognized them both. There was no longer any doubt, no longer any hope for me.