“And now--see--I close my hand--so!... And this beautiful marriage of which you have dreamed, your marriage with Mees Peterson--_it does not take place!_” “Are you mad?” asked Blaise contemptuously, experiencing all an Englishman’s distaste for this display of unforced drama. She shook her head. “No,” she said quietly. “I am not mad.” The air of theatricality seemed to fall suddenly away from her, leaving her a stern and sombre figure, invested with an intrinsic atmosphere of tragedy, filled with one sentiment only--the thirst for vengeance. “No. I am not mad. I am telling you the truth. You can never marry Jean Peterson, because Nesta--your wife--still lives.” Tormarin fell back a pace. For one moment he believed the woman had gone genuinely mad--that by dint of long brooding upon how she might most hurt and punish the Englishman whom she had never forgiven for marrying her sister, she had evolved from a half-crazed mind the belief that Nesta still lived and that thus she would be able to prevent his marriage with any other woman. And then, looking into those seeming soft brown eyes with the granite hardness in their depths, he could see the light of reason burning steadily within them. Madame de Varigny was quite sane, as sane as he was himself. And if so... A great fear came upon him--the fear of a man who dimly senses the approach of some appalling danger and knows that it will find him utterly defenceless. “Do you know what you are saying?” he demanded, his voice roughened and uneven. “Yes, I know. Nesta is alive,” she repeated simply. “_Alive?_” The word was wrung from him, hardly more than a hoarse whisper of sound. He swung round upon her violently. “But you yourself wrote and told me of her death?” She nodded placidly. “Yes. I wrote a lie.” “But the official information? We had that, too, later, from the French police, confirming your account. You had better be careful about what you are telling me,” he added sternly. “Lies won’t answer, now.” “The need for lying is past,” she answered with the most absolute candour. “The French police wrote quite truthfully all they knew. They had found the body of a suicide, whom I identified as my sister. To strengthen matters I bribed someone I knew also to identify the dead girl as Nesta. She was a married woman, too, the poor little dead, one! So it was quite simple. And I took Nesta home--home to Château Varigny. I had married by then. But she had heard of my marriage through friends in Italy and wrote to me from there, telling me of her misery with you and begging me to succour her. So I went to Italy and brought her back with me to Varigny. Then I planned that you should believe her dead. It was all very simple,” she repeated complacently. “But what was your object in all this? Why did you scheme to keep me in ignorance? What was your purpose?”