She felt that she had been amply revenged upon the man who had treated her so cruelly. She had crushed him with a completeness that would have satisfied even the most revengeful of women. She had seen him flying from the house without waiting for the girl to recover consciousness. What finer scheme of vengeance could any woman hope for--and she had always heard that women were revengeful--than that which had been placed within her reach? And yet she lay awake in her tears, feeling that she would give up all she had in the world if by so doing, she could compass the happiness of the man who had treated her so basely, and of the girl who had supplanted her in his love. She felt that revenge was not sweet but bitter. When she had been standing before him in the room downstairs and had felt stung to the soul by that horrible question of his, “Will you make me wish that I had never seen you?” she had had a moment of womanly pleasure, thinking of the power she had to crush him utterly; but all her passion had amounted to no more than was susceptible of being exhausted in half-a-dozen phrases. Her passion of reproach, which found expression in those words that had been forced from her, had not lasted beyond the speaking of those words. So soon as they were spoken she found herself face to face not with the delight of revenge, but with the grief of self-reproach. She was actually ready to heap reproaches upon herself for having failed to see within the first hour of the arrival of Clare that the man loved her. How was it that she had failed to see that their meeting aboard the steamer had resulted in love? She felt that she must have been blinder than all manner of women to fail to perceive that this was so. Was she not to blame for having allowed them to be together day after day, while she had in her desk that letter which told her that no two people in the world should be kept wider apart than Claude Westwood and Clare Tristram? She recollected that at first her impulse had been to send the girl away; but when she found that she and Claude were already acquainted, and that the terrible secret was known to neither of them, the panic which had seized her subsided. That was, she felt, where she had been to blame. She should not have wilfully closed her eyes to the possibility of their falling in love. Even though the advice which Sir Percival had given to her--the advice to wait patiently until Claude's old love for her returned--was still in her mind, she now felt that if she had been like other women she would have foreseen the possibility, nay, the likelihood, that Claude would come to love the girl by whom he had clearly been impressed.