The dark face of Robert Lacy had arisen like a ghost from her dead past--that past from which she shrank with loathing indescribable. As for the man, his recognition of her had been swift and instantaneous, too. The red roses dropped from his hands as he flung them up, and her name fell from his lips in accents of wolfish menace, strangely blended with a sort of fierce, angry joy: “Camille!” Mrs. de Vere fell upon her knees, and crouching, with uplifted hands, wailed, tremulously: “Vanish, in the name of God!” “Ha! ha! so you take me for a ghost, do you?” jeered Robert Lacy. He bent down and looked into her frightened face and staring eyes with an evil smile, continuing: “Well, it isn’t strange that you do, seeing that the last time we met I was hanging on a gallows-tree, betrayed into the hands of Judge Lynch by you, madame--by you, you false jade! You went away with the rest and left me there for the buzzards to pick my bones, while you fled so fast from the scene that perhaps you never heard how one spectator--one man with a heart--cut me down and saved me from my awful fate. My neck was not broken, and he brought me back to life again. Then I fled from California with him, and have been in his service ever since, with but one thought in my heart, and that was to find my heartless wife and punish her for her perfidy!” She crouched on the ground, muttering fearfully, with chattering teeth: “You--you--are mistaken--in the person! I--I--never saw you before, sir!” Robert Lacy laughed most bitterly. “That is a lie, madame!” he retorted, scornfully. “You recognized me the moment you saw me, in spite of the twelve years that have passed since those days in California when you loved me at first with a fierce love that turned to a fierce hate--a hate that compassed my death, as you thought. But I am alive, no thanks to you, Camille. And I have found you at last. Should I not know that red head and those hazel eyes in a thousand, madly as I once loved them--cruelly as I have hated them all these years? Do not dare deny your identity to me! Get up and tell me what you have done, and where you have been all those long years when you believed that my bleached skeleton was swinging still in the wind on the Californian hills!” He bent threateningly toward her with so fierce an expression that she dragged herself fearfully up to her feet, clinging with both hands to the tree, while she muttered defiantly: “I will tell you nothing, you miserable horse-thief, only that I am sorry you are not dead as I believed! Go away and leave me. I have naught to do with such as you!”