“It is very easy to interpret them, nevertheless,” she sneered. “A certain physician was known to be in Paris, and you could not keep away from him. Yours is an exceedingly romantic story, Salome—even you do not dream how romantic. I am willing to wager a handsome sum against those ugly glasses of yours, that you don’t know just who Dr. Winthrop is after all,” and she regarded the girl with a malicious look. “What do you mean?” Salome asked, with undisguised astonishment. “You have never had a suspicion, I suppose,” her tormentor went on, “that the handsome doctor may have had as romantic a history as your own? Did no one ever tell you that he was betrothed to another at the time you lured him into that hasty and unfortunate marriage in Boston?” Salome’s white lips quivered painfully!—how cruel they were to taunt her thus with all her misery. “Yes—madam told me,” she faltered. “Did she tell you to whom he was betrothed! No, of course she did not, or you would not look so innocent and curious,” Miss Rochester went on relentlessly. “It is the strangest story in the world—the most wonderful complication I ever heard of—and you were always a marplot Salome——” “Tell me—tell me,” interposed Salome, with quivering eagerness, “and do not keep me in this torturing suspense. What do you mean? what is there strange or mysterious about him?—to whom was he betrothed?” “To my husband’s daughter—to Sadie Rochester,” cried Mrs. Rochester, turning a vindictive look upon the unhappy and trembling girl, “and the man whom you have fondly supposed to be your husband and lost, is no other than Truman Hamilton, the adopted son and heir of Milton Hamilton, who decreed that he should marry the daughter of his friend or—forfeit his inheritance!” Salome had risen to her feet as if electrified at the woman’s first words, and she had seemed to freeze where she stood, as she went on—a look first of incredulity, then horror, then despair overspreading her colorless face. Then, as the full force of all that she had learned burst upon her, a low cry of anguish broke from her, she swayed dizzily for a moment where she stood, and then sank back upon the couch, from which she had just risen, and fainted away again. CHAPTER XXIV. A BACKWARD GLANCE. It will be necessary now to go back a little, in order to learn how Salome happened to be in Paris during the raging of the plague, which slew its hundreds and thousands, and yet so mercifully passed her by. We saw her last just driving away in a carriage from the home from which she believed herself to have been driven by the man she loved. She took nothing with her save the one trunk containing the simple wardrobe which she had brought from Boston, and she ordered the driver to take her directly to the Grand Central Depot. This, however, was only done to conceal her movements, for she had no intention of leaving New York.