“I do not understand. Has the mere sight of an old friend so overcome you?” she asked, with a little of her old coquetry; and, going nearer, she laid her white hand on his arm, but he shrunk in horror from her light touch. “I--I--thought--you--dead!” he managed to mutter, in disconnected words; and she removed her hand from his arm and fell back a pace from him. “You thought me dead? Ah, then, you did not come here to see me?” bitterly. “Certainly not,” he answered, regaining himself in a measure, though he was still ghastly white and trembling. “I thought you dead four years ago. Norman de Vere had married again. It was to see his second wife that I came to Verelands.” “His second wife? What was she to you or your sister?” Camille asked, with a sneer. “A dear and valued friend,” he replied, gazing at her with eyes of steady scorn that made her burst out angrily: “The poor foundling creature, basely born, no doubt, was fortunate in finding nobly born friends like Lady Moreland and Lord Stuart?” “I do not understand your allusions,” Lord Stuart said, icily. “Do you not?” she asked, in wonder. She gazed steadily at him, then said, eagerly: “Lord Stuart, possibly you do not know the whole story of my bitter wrongs at the hands of my faithless husband. Will you not sit down and let me tell you all?” He was about to refuse, but with her eager white hands she pushed him gently into a chair. “Do not refuse,” she pleaded. “Once you were a very good friend of mine. Why not now? God knows I have suffered enough at my husband’s hands through your admiration for you to make me the small atonement of pitying me, of sympathizing with me in this hour.” She flung herself into a chair opposite to him, and hurried into what she called the relation of her wrongs, and the first complaint began with the bringing of Little Sweetheart to Verelands. “Of course I was wrong in believing the child his own, as he proved my suspicions false by marrying the girl afterward,” she admitted. “But do you not think with me, Lord Stuart, that he should have taken the child away when I requested, nay, commanded it?” “You must excuse me for not passing judgment upon the master of Verelands under his own roof. That would be discourteous,” he said; but she noticed that he was very curious over the things she told him. He did not disdain to ask questions, and he extracted from her all the information she could impart regarding the origin of Sweetheart. “Norman believed that the woman on the train with the child was her mother,” said Camille. “But the child, when asked, denied it. She said the woman’s name was Mattie. My own theory, Lord Stuart, was that the woman was some circus creature, and that the child had been trained to act upon the stage. She was pert and precocious for one of her age.” When the subject of Sweetheart had been exhausted, she took up her innocent flirtation with himself.