“‘I am his wife now,’ she said; ‘I will hear nothing against him. And you, Nannette, who brought about the match, should be the last to tempt me to do so.’ “I was very angry, and heaped bitter reproaches upon her,” pursued the Madame, almost overcome by emotion. “She heard them in grieved silence, which somehow only exasperated me the more, and I said still harder and more cruel words. And so I left her.” For some minutes the room was filled with the sound of the Madame’s sobs, and Ethel wept with her. “It was our last interview,” she began again in a broken voice. “A few days later her husband spirited her away no one knew whither, and from that day to this I have never heard a word from her or about her, except what I have learned through you--her child. “I have now told you of my crime; I have yet to tell of its punishment. In spite of all my unkindness, I loved my sister; how dearly I never guessed till she was gone. I was nearly frantic at her loss, and at the thought of my last words to her. “The world went prosperously with us so far as money was concerned. My husband invested my little fortune and his own partly in an oil-well, partly in a gold-mine in California, and we were wonderfully successful in both. But we were not happy. Remorse and anxiety about Pansy made me wretched and robbed me of my vivacity and my bloom. I grew dull and spiritless, and my husband began to neglect me and to seek the society of other women, whom, as he said, he found more entertaining. “I sought forgetfulness in dress and all sorts of dissipation. I could not bear to be alone; but sometimes Monsieur Le Conte’s business would call him away for days and weeks together. I had no child, and I could not always go out or contrive to have company in the house; and so at times I would try to drown my misery in the wine-cup. “I did not become a drunkard, but two or three times I drank to intoxication.” She paused, and, with a downward glance at her mutilated limb, sighed heavily. “One wild, stormy night I was quite alone,” she continued. “The wind howled round the house like a legion of devils, as it seemed to me, and the air was full of eerie sounds. I had been more than usually depressed all day, and grew worse and worse as the hours crept slowly by. My husband I knew would not be home before morning; one servant was away, and the other had gone to bed in a distant part of the house. “I wasn’t exactly afraid, but I kept thinking of Ethel, and how I had ill-used her, and that I should probably never see her again, till I was half crazed with remorse. At last I could not endure it any longer. I kept wine in a closet in my dressing-room; I went to it, poured out and drank one glass after another till I was quite stupefied. “The last thing I remember is dropping into a chair beside the fire--a low-down grate filled with glowing coals; the next I knew I awoke in my bed, roused to consciousness by a sharp pain in my right arm.