"The coward!" she went on bitterly; "and to think I could ever have loved such a thing as he! Do you know, Mr. X., that I never knew he had been married till after he had fled? Then his father told me how he had courted my father's money, with his wife lying dead at home. Oh! Senor Francisco, Senor Francisco! Before I heard that, I wanted to kill the woman who had stolen you from me. The moment after I could have struck you dead at my feet." She threw her arm up, holding her fan like a dagger. I believed her, and so would any one who had seen her then. "I had hardly settled in Havana," she continued, "before I received a letter from him. Already he wanted to come back to me. Had the other woman tired of him already? I asked myself, or was it really true, as his father had told me, that he had fled alone? I answered the letter, and he wrote again. Again I answered, and so it was kept up. For two years I played with the love I now knew was worthless. He was traveling round the world, and a dozen times wanted to come directly to me. I insisted that he should keep his journey up--as a probation, you see. He submitted. But oh! how he did love me!" The exultation with which she told this was absolutely fiendish. I could see in it, plainer than any words could tell it to me, the scheme of vengeance she had carried out, the alternating hopes and torments to which she had raised, and into which she had plunged him. I could see him wandering around the globe, scourged by remorses, agonized by doubts, and maddened by despairs, accepting the lies she wrote him as inviolable pledges, and sustaining himself with the vision of a future never to be fulfilled. She read the expression of my face, and laughed. "Was it not an idea?" she asked. "Was that not better than this?" And again she stabbed the air with her fan. "But--pardon me the question--but you have begun the confidence," I said. "How will it end?" "It has ended," she answered. "How?" "I had been divorced while I was writing to him. A year ago he was to be in London, where I was to meet him. While he was sailing from the Cape of Good Hope I was being married to a man who loved me for myself, and to whom I had confided all. Instead of my address at the London post office he received a notification of my marriage, addressed to him in my own hand and mailed to him by myself. He wrote once or twice still, but my husband indorsed the letters with his own name and returned them unopened. He may be dead for all I know, but I hope and pray he is still alive, and will remain alive and love me for a thousand years."