“Will he do it? Can he doom me to the gallows-tree?” the half-mad creature asked herself hourly; and as each day rolled away she began to feel more secure. “He can not do it, much as he hates me. I know he could not harm me, even for her sake. The past makes me sacred in his eyes still,” she began to think with keen triumph in her power. CHAPTER LXIII. In the trouble that had fallen upon him, Norman de Vere quite forgot Lord Stuart and his sister, the guests whom he was soon to receive at Verelands, or he would have written to them of all that had happened during his trip to New York and since his return to Jacksonville. But, half crazed with trouble and anxiety, the young man could remember nothing except that his dear mother lay upon a sick, perhaps death-bed, and that his darling wife and child had gone into a most impenetrable exile, hounded from home and love by the most fiendish plot the brain of a wicked woman ever devised. While duty held him chained to his mother’s side, he had committed to a clever detective the task of tracing Sweetheart, and every moment a prayer went up from his heart that she might soon be found. That she could no longer be his--that Camille’s life had thrust their lives apart--he realized, but that a home must be provided for Sweetheart and the child, he felt imperatively necessary. If Heaven spared his mother’s life, she would go and live with them, he knew, and for himself nothing remained but to denounce Camille for the murder of Robert Lacy--to denounce her and doom her to the solitude of the prison cell. The murder had been committed so long ago that she would not be hung for it, he knew. Time, and the fact that she was a woman, would both be in her favor. Southern juries were chivalrous, too. He recalled all this with satisfaction, for bitterly as Camille had wronged him and his, the man’s heart shrunk at thought of the vengeance he must take on the fair, faulty creature who had once been his wife, for whom he had felt a boy’s delirious passion. “But I can not spare her if I would, for she has rushed madly, recklessly upon her fate. For Sweetheart’s sake, for our child’s sake, this guilty woman must be placed behind prison bars. Then the law will free me forever from her hated claim, and the marriage ceremony shall make Sweetheart once more my own,” he thought. But while his mother lay ill he made no effort to molest Camille in her triumphant occupation of Verelands. His anxiety over his loved ones tortured him too cruelly. Meantime, the days rolled by, and Lord Stuart and Lady Edith Moreland left New York for Jacksonville. They did not think it necessary to write or telegraph to their friends, still carrying out their fancy for surprising Sweetheart. Lady Edith was as eager and joyous as a child when they took a carriage at the station to drive to Verelands.