That night the heavens were overcast with heavy clouds, and torrents of rain poured down upon the face of the earth, and peal after peal of thunder boomed through the heavy heated air. Helen could not sleep; she rose, feverish and unrested from her husband's side, and paced wildly and miserably about the room. Then she went to the window and drew back the curtain, and looked out upon the storm-driven world. The clouds racked wildly across the sky; the trees bent and swayed before the howling wind; the rain beat in floods upon the ground; yet greater and fiercer still was the tempest that raged in Helen Kynaston's heart. Hatred, jealousy, and malice strove and struggled within her, and something direr still--a terror that she could not quench nor stifle; for late that night her husband had said to her suddenly, without a word of warning or preparation-- "Helen, do you know a Frenchman called D'Arblet?" Helen had been at her dressing-table--her back was turned to him--he did not see the livid pallor which blanched her cheeks at his question. A little pause, during which she busied herself among the trifles upon the table. "No, I never heard the name in my life," she said, at length. "That is odd--because neither have I--and yet the man has sent me a parcel." It was of so little importance to him, that it did not occur to him that there could possibly be any occasion for secresy concerning Vera's commission. What could an utter stranger have to send to him that could possibly concern him in any way? It did not strike him how strained and forced was the voice in which his wife presently asked him a question. "And the parcel! You have opened it?" "No, not yet," began Maurice, stifling a yawn; and he would have gone on to explain to her that it was not yet actually in his possession, although, probably, he would not have told her that it was Vera who was to give it to him; only at that minute the maid came into the room, and he changed the subject. But Helen had guessed that it was Vera who was the bearer of that parcel. How it had come to pass she could not tell, but too surely she divined that Vera had in her possession those fatal letters that she had once written to the French vicomte; the letters that would blast her for ever in her husband's estimation, and turn his luke-warmness and his coldness into actual hatred and repulsion. And was it likely that Vera, with such a weapon in her hands, would spare her? What woman, with so signal a revenge in her power, would forego the delight of wreaking it upon the woman who had taken from her the man she loved? Helen knew that in Vera's place she would show no mercy to her rival. It was all clear as daylight to her now; the appointment at the vicarage gate, the something which she had said in her note she had for him; the whole mystery of the secret meeting between them--it was Vera's revenge. Vera, whom Maurice loved, and whom she, Helen, hated with such a deadly hatred!