“As you have asked me some questions, I may be allowed the privilege of retaliating. May I ask if she jilted you?” “No. Oh! no. Would to Heaven she had done so, and saved me these years of bitter hate and regret!” “Is she your sister?” demanded Paul Desfrayne, startled by the overthrow of the supposition he had so readily built up. “No. She is the only woman I have ever loved, or can ever love again.” “Do you still love her, or do you hate her for being so far beyond you?” Gilardoni regarded his master with a strange, inexplicable look, and then broke into a low, savagely bitter laugh. “May I ask, sir,” he said, “if she jilted _you_? She was quite capable of playing the coquette to amuse herself, and then laughing in your face, for her soul was really steeped in ambitious desires.” “I believe, my good fellow, ambition was her besetting sin--is still, if what folks say be true. No, she did not jilt me. But you have not answered my question. Be frank with me. Tell me why you hate this woman. Why do you hate her--and yet, why do you feel anger at finding her gifts in the possession of another?” “This cross,” said Gilardoni, tearing it from its wrapper, and holding it out at arm’s length, with a strange, vindictive smile, “was my gift to her--given the day I told her I loved her, and asked her----” “What?” “She pretended she returned my love. Bah! Her heart was as cold as ice. She cares for no one but herself. She was born a peasant girl, yet never was princess of blood royal more proud, more insolent, more resolved to stand above the common herd. I adored her. I was like one bereft of his senses when she was near me. She had but to will, and I obeyed like the basest slave. Bah! I made an idol and tricked it out with all the graces of my love-smitten imagination, and fell down and worshiped it. I believed that she was exactly what my weak, foolish heart pictured her to be. I would have raised her from her ignoble station, but not to the height she desired to climb. To be a Russian princess, or the lady of some great English milord, was her dream.” “I know it,” said Paul Desfrayne, very quietly, yet he felt that some great revelation was at hand. That the revelation was to be to his advantage he did not hope. “But not at the time when I linked about her neck the chain that held this poor little gewgaw,” cried Gilardoni excitedly. “No, no. At that time she was barely conscious of her power to charm--just waking to the consciousness of her dangerous charm of beauty. I was her first victim, her first triumph. She was a girl of sixteen then; I was about six or seven years her senior. We had been neighbors and friends from childhood. I taught her such songs and snatches of music as I occasionally picked up, and she loved to warble the chants and psalms she heard at chapel. She had not discovered that she had a fortune in her throat. If she had not found out _that_, we might have been a happy, contented couple at this day.”