While he spoke the guilty woman stood her ground, facing him defiantly, her white face twitching with sneers, her jeweled hands clinching and unclinching themselves in impotent wrath, as the young man went on, scathingly: “It is no wonder you will not part with your clever maid. She is too useful to you. But her time has come now. She shall go!” “Norman!” cried his mother, beseechingly; but neither of them heeded her. Camille was crying passionately: “Who is my accuser?” “The detective whom I employed to unravel the mysterious affair. He dragged it out of the miserable old rag picker with whom Finette made her bargain.” She stood still a moment, looking at the white set face of the man she loved with such jealous passion, and a feeling like death stole over her at the thought of losing him. Despite all her caprices, all her taunts, all her jealous madness, she knew that Norman de Vere had loved her well and truly in their two stormy years of wedded life, and she, ah! she--she adored him in her wild, strange fashion. To lose his love were to lose heaven, she thought, impiously. Yet in the dark, burning eyes that he fixed on her face, in the curl of his beautiful lips she read something that she feared and dreaded--the dawning of that hour when, goaded by her injustice, her jealousy, her cruelty, he should throw off the fetters of love that bound him, and regret the fatal hour that made their two lives one. As white as death she stood facing him, wondering how she should extricate herself from her terrible strait, how escape from the web of fate her own reckless hands had spun, for escape she must, or bear his stinging contempt to her life’s end. The passionate, undisciplined creature flung her jeweled hands up to her face, and her slender, graceful figure shook for a moment like a leaf in a storm, then as suddenly she withdrew them, and, with a gesture of infinite pathos, fixed her blazing eyes upon the face of the angry man. “This from you, Norman--this from you? Oh, Heaven, it is too cruel!” she cried out in accents of reproach and pain. He did not answer; he stood staring at her dumbly, while she continued: “Poor indeed must be the quality of your love for me if you can credit such a charge against my honor!” “There is proof,” he answered, icily. “There is no proof! There can not be, for I am not guilty of this thing!” she cried out, wildly. “Oh, send for Finette! Surely there is some horrible mistake.” He crossed to the door and said something to a servant in the hall. In a few moments Finette made her appearance among them, and the door was again shut and locked. “Oh, miladi, are you ill again?” cried the deceitful French woman, pretending the liveliest anxiety. She went eagerly forward to Mrs. de Vere, and a swift, telegraphic glance passed between the two unnoticed by the others.