"You may wait beyond, in the ante-room!" The woman who had emerged from the dark penumbra of a dead Past, to torture the embryo Baronet, gazed silently at the stern old man glowering there.
Striding up to her, the insolent habit of years was, strong upon him, as he hoarsely said: "What juggling fiend of hell brings you here ?" Without a tremor in her voice, the lady of Jitomir replied: "I came here to undo the work of years! To teach an orphaned girl to know that a love which hallows and which blesses, can reach her from the grave in which your cold brutality buried the only being I ever loved! She shall know her mother, from my lips, and not wither in the gray hell of your egoism.

I have searched the world over, and found you, at last, together!" "By God! You shall never even see her face, you she-devil!" cried the infuriated old man, nearing the defiant woman.

"You were the go-between for your worthless sister and that Russian cur, Troubetskoi!" "You lie! Hugh Fraser, you lie!" cried Berthe, in a ringing voice.

"You crushed the flower that Fate had drifted within your reach! You turned her into the streets of London to starve! You robbed her of her child, all this to feed your own flinty-hearted tyrant vanity! She was divorced from you by a Royal Russian Decree, before she married the man whose heart broke when she was laid in the tomb.

She rests with the princes of his line, and her tomb bears the name of wife!" The old nabob crept nearer, growling: "You shall never see the child's face!" Then, Alixe Delavigne sprang up and faced him: "There she is! on my heart! Just what her mother was, before you sent her to an early grave.
Valerie died hungering for one sight of that child's face!" Throwing the picture of Nadine Johnstone on the table, the lady of Jitomir said: "Pierre Troubetskoi left to me the wealth which makes me your equal.