"No, I did not. I went back to the beautiful cottage where I had lived in a fool's Paradise one fatal year. Before I reached there I saw _him_ standing alone on the banks of the river. I told you I thirsted for his blood. Nothing could have cooled the fire of my terrible hate but his life-blood poured out in a free libation. His back was turned to me, he neither saw nor heard me. I crept up behind him, I--oh, Sydney, do not look at me so! Remember it was not little Queenie, but a woman gone mad over her terrible wrongs. I could not help it. I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him down into the river!" "You are even worse than I thought you, Queenie," exclaimed her sister; "yet you--a Magdalen, a murderess--you dared to come back to us and to marry Captain Ernscliffe!" "I disclaim either of the hard names you have called me, Sydney," her sister answered, defiantly. "I have been deeply sinned against, but I have not sinned. I had no intention of evil when I eloped with Leon Vinton. I thought I was his wife when I lived with him. When I pushed him into the river it was a simple act of justice. If I had gone home to papa and told him my wrongs, and he had killed Leon Vinton, society would have applauded the act and any jury would have acquitted him. It was right for me to punish him. I gloried in the deed." Sydney made a gesture of abhorrence. "The only pity," continued the actress, passionately, "is that I did not succeed in my revenge. He rose upon the water once after I pushed him in, and saw me on the bank. Then he shook his fist at me and shouted, with his mouth full of water: 'If I live I will have revenge for this!' Then he went under again, and I ran away and went home to papa." "Then he was not drowned, after all?" said Sydney. "No, he was saved from a watery grave, and forthwith began to dog my footsteps again, though so cautiously that I never dreamed but that he was dead. The night I was married I saw him looking in the window at me, but I took him for a ghost or an illusion of fancy, never for a moment as a living creature. But in the moment that I was made a bride he sent me a bouquet. I inhaled the perfume and fell senseless. It was drugged with a powerful sleeping potion. I was not dead, only asleep and unconscious, when they buried me. Leon Vinton resurrected me that night, and confined me as a hated prisoner at the cottage to which he had taken me a happy, thoughtless young bride. That was his diabolical revenge. He knew where I was all the time, but he waited until the full cup of happiness was pressed to my lips, then dashed it away, and spilled the precious wine forever." She looked at her elder sister with a tearless agony in her pansy-blue eyes, but Sydney only said, impatiently: "I am anxious to hear how you happened to become such a noted actress."