"If your wife is dead, as you say, Clifford, you ought to marry me. You owe it to me, after all I gave up for your sake. You know I trusted in your promises." "You were a fool for your pains," he replied, with brutal frankness. "You had knowledge enough of the world to be sure that a silly married woman who deserts her husband for another man will surely reap what she has sown." "You swore you would marry me when Cameron Clemens secured a divorce." "You were very silly to believe me, Azuba. I was only amusing myself with your credulity. A man never means the vows he makes in an affair of that kind. The time is sure to come when he will meet some pure young girl, and give her the best of his heart. Then he despises the weak victims of his past passions." "As you despise me?" she demanded, bitterly. "It would not be polite to say so," he replied, indifferently, and hearing her stifled sob, he added, impatiently: "Bah, Azuba! I have quite got over my old fancy for you, and your sniveling cannot warm over the old coals. I never really loved you--never knew the power of love until I met pretty Geraldine, and the only way for you to get a kind thought from me is to help me to win the little beauty." Crushed and humiliated by his scorn, she would have defied him if she had dared, but she was in his power, and dared not do it; so, ere they parted, the plot for Geraldine's abduction was made, and nothing remained but to carry it out that night. "Do not dare to fail me, or the weight of my vengeance will crush you," he said, threateningly, and with a shudder she promised to obey. They parted, and he hurried to the theatre, where she had told him Geraldine had gone. Securing a seat in the orchestra circle, in the desirable concealment of a pillar, he alternately watched the heiress and the play. An angry sneer curled his lips as he saw the new leading man in the play was even superior to himself in the role of the hero. "So I can never get back my position in that company," he mused. "Well, no matter! I shall marry the heiress, and if the old woman cuts up rough and won't give us any of her daughter's money, we can go on the stage, and the elopement will be an advertisement for us." As he watched Geraldine in all her beauty, sitting with her friends, his passion for her grew deeper, and he mentally hugged himself at the thought of how soon he would have her in his power. When her carriage rolled away, and he noted the lingering glance sent after it by Cameron Clemens, he sneered, grimly: "Bah! what fools love makes of us all! There is Clemens as madly in love with that hateful Cissy Carroll as I am with pretty Geraldine. He has been in love with her ever since Azuba Aylesford forced them apart, to marry him herself. Egad! I did them a good turn when I flattered Mrs. Clemens into eloping with me; and if the Carroll girl ever gets him back she may thank me for ridding him of his incumbrance, though she hates me like poison!"