If she had hesitated outside the room to summon the courage to face the man who would demand so much of her, there was nothing in her manner when she entered to indicate that such had been the case. She approached him without a symptom of nervousness or irresolution. Her dark eyes met his without wavering, and there was purpose in them.

She devoted a single glance of surprise to the uncurtained window on entering the door, and an instant later scrutinised the floor with unmistakable interest, as if expecting to find something there to account for his motive in admitting the glare of light, something to confound and accuse her. But there was no fear in the look.

She had put on a rather plain white blouse, open at the neck. The cuffs were rolled up nearly to the elbows, evidence that she had been using her hands in some active employment and had either forgotten or neglected to restore the sleeves to their proper position. A chic black walking-skirt lent to her trim, erect figure a suggestion of girlishness.

Her arms hung straight down at her sides, limply it would have seemed at first glance, but in reality they were rigid.

“I have come, as I said I would,” she said, after a long, tense silence. Her voice was low, huskier than ever, but without a tremor of excitement. “You did not say you would wait for me here, but I knew you would do so. The hour of reckoning has come. We must pay, both of us. I am not frightened by your silence, James, nor am I afraid of what you may say or do. First of all, it is expected that Frederic will die. Dr Hodder has proclaimed it. He is a great surgeon. He ought to know. But he doesn't know—do you hear? He does not know. I shall not let him die.”

“One moment, if you please,” said her husband coldly. “You may spare me the theatrics. Moreover, we will not discuss Frederic. What we have to say to each other has little to do with that poor boy downstairs. This is your hour of reckoning, not his. Bear that———”

“You are very much mistaken,” she interrupted, her gaze growing more fixed than before. “He is a part of our reckoning. He is the one great character in this miserable, unlooked-for tragedy. Will you be so kind as to draw those curtains? And do me the honour to allow me to sit in your presence.”

There was infinite scorn in her voice. “I am very tired. I have not been idle. Every minute of my waking hours belongs to your son, James Brood, but I owe this half-hour to you. You shall know the truth about me, as I know it about you. I did not count on this hour ever being a part of my life, but it has to be, and I shall face it without weeping over what might have been. Will you draw the curtains?”

He hesitated a moment and then jerked the curtains together, shutting out the pitiless glare.

“Will you be seated there?” he said quietly, pointing to a chair at the end of the table.

She switched on the light in the big lamp, but instead of taking the chair indicated, sank into one on the opposite side of the table, with the mellow light full upon her lovely, serious face.

“Sit there,” she said, signifying the chair he had requested her to take. “Please sit down,” she went on impatiently, as he continued to regard her forbiddingly from his position near the window.

“I shall be better able to say what I have to say standing,” he said significantly.

“Do you expect me to plead with you for forgiveness?” she inquired, with an unmistakable look of surprise.

“You may save yourself the humiliation of such——”

“But you are gravely mistaken,” she interrupted. “I shall ask nothing of you.”

“Then we need not prolong the———”

“I have come to explain, not to plead,” she went on resolutely. “I want to tell you why I married you. You will not find it a pleasant story, nor will you be proud of your conquest. It will not be necessary for you to turn me out of your house. I entered it with the determination to leave it in my own good time. I think you had better sit down.”

He looked at her fixedly for a moment, as if striving to materialise a thought that lay somewhere in the back of his mind. He was vaguely conscious of an impression that he could unfathom all this seeming mystery without a suggestion from her if given the time to concentrate his mind on the vague, hazy suggestion that tormented his memory.

He sat down opposite her and rested his arms on the table. The lines about his mouth were rigid, uncompromising, but there was a look of wonder in his eyes.

She leaned forward in her chair, the better to watch the changing expression in his eyes as she progressed with her story. Her hands were clenched tightly under the table's edge.

“You are looking into my eyes, as you have looked a hundred times,” she said after a moment. “There is something in them that has puzzled you since the night when you looked into them across that great ballroom in London. You have always felt that they were not new to you, that you have had them constantly in front of you for ages. Do you remember when you first saw me, James Brood?”

He stared, and his eyes widened.

“I never saw you in my life until that night in London, I———”

“Look closely. Isn't there something more than doubt in your mind as you look into them now?”

“I confess that I have always been puzzled by by something I cannot understand in—but all this leads to nothing,” he broke off harshly. “We are not here to mystify each other, but to———”

“To explain mysteries, that's it, of course. You are looking. What do you see? Are you not sure that you looked into my eyes long, long ago? Are there not moments when my voice is familiar to you, when it speaks to you out of———”

He sat up, rigid as a block of stone.

“Yes, by Heaven, I have felt it all along! To-day I was convinced that the unbelievable had happened. I saw something that———” He stopped short, his lips parted.

She waved her hand in the direction of the Buddha.

“Have you never petitioned your too-stolid friend over there to unravel the mystery for you? In the quiet of certain lonely, speculative hours have you not wondered where you had seen me before, long, long before the night in London? In all the years that you have been trying to convince yourself that Frederic is not your son has there not been the vision of———”

“What are you saying to me? Are you trying to tell me that you are Matilde?”

“If not Matilde, then who am I, pray?” she demanded.

He sank back frowning.

“It cannot be possible. I would know her a thousand years from now. You cannot trick me into believing—but, who are you?” He leaned forward again, clutching the edge of the table. “I sometimes think you are a ghost come to haunt me, to torture me. What trick, what magic is behind all this? Has her soul, her spirit, her actual being found a lodging-place in you, and have you been sent to curse me for———”

She rose half-way out of her chair, leaning farther across the table.

“Yes, James Brood, I represent the spirit of Matilde Valeska, if you will have it so. Not sent to curse you, but to love you. That's the pity of it all. I swear to you that it is the spirit of Matilde that urges me to love you and to spare you now. It is the spirit of Matilde that stands between her son and death. But it is not Matilde who confronts you here and now, you may be sure of that. Matilde loved you. She loves you now, even in her grave. You will never be able to escape from that wonderful love of hers. If there have been times—and God help me, there were many, I know—when I appeared to love you for myself, I swear to you that I was moved by the spirit of Matilde. I—I am as much mystified, as greatly puzzled as yourself. I came here to hate you, and I have loved you; yes, there were moments when I actually loved you.”

Her voice died away into a whisper. For many seconds they sat looking into each other's eyes, neither possessing the power to break the strange spell of silence that had fallen upon them.

“No, it is not Matilde who confronts you now, but one who would not spare you as she did up to the hour of her death. You are quite safe from ghosts from this hour on, my friend. You will never see Matilde again, though you look into my eyes till the end of time. Frederic may see, may feel the spirit of his mother, but you—ah, no! You have seen the last of her. Her blood is in my veins, her wrongs are in my heart. It was she with whom you fell in love, and it was she you married six months ago, but now the curtain is lifted. Don't you know me now, James? Can your memory carry you back twenty-three years and deliver you from doubt and perplexity? Look closely, I say. I was six years old then, and———”

Brood was glaring at her as one stupefied. Suddenly he cried out in a loud voice. “You are you are the little sister? The little ThÉrÈse?”

She was standing now, leaning far over the table, for he had shrunk down into his chair.

“The little ThÉrÈse, yes! Now do you begin to see? Now do you begin to realise what I came here to do? Now do you know why I married you? Isn't it clear to you? Well, I have tried to do all these things so that I might break your heart as you broke hers. I came to make you pay!”

She was speaking rapidly, excitedly now. Her voice was high-pitched and unnatural. Her eyes seemed to be driving him deeper and deeper into the chair, forcing him down as though with a giant's hand.

“The little, timid, heart-broken ThÉrÈse who would not speak to you, nor kiss you, nor say goodbye to you when you took her darling sister away from the Bristol in the Kartnerring more than twenty years ago. Ah, how I loved her, how I loved her! And how I hated you for taking her away from me. Shall I ever forget that wedding night? Shall I ever forget the grief, the loneliness, the hatred that dwelt in my poor little heart that night? Everyone was happy, the whole world was happy; but was I? I was crushed with grief. You were taking her away across the awful sea, and you were to make her happy, so they said, aÏe, so said my beloved, joyous sister.

“You stood before the altar in St Stephens's with her and promised, promised, promised everything. I heard you. I sat with my mother and turned to ice, but I heard you. All Vienna, all Budapest said that you promised naught but happiness to each other. She was twenty-one. She was lovely; ah, far lovelier than that wretched photograph lying there in front of you. It was made when she was eighteen. She did not write those words on the back of the card. I wrote them, not more than a month ago, before I gave it to Frederic. To this house she came twenty-three years ago. You brought her here the happiest girl in all the world. How did you send her away? How?”

He stirred in the chair. A spasm of pain crossed his face.

“And I was the happiest man in all the world,” he said hoarsely. “You are forgetting one thing, ThÉrÈse.” He fell into the way of calling her ThÉrÈse as if he had known her by no other name. “Your sister was not content to preserve the happiness that———”

“Stop!” she commanded. “You are not to speak evil of her now. You will never think evil of her after what I am about to tell you. You will curse yourself. Somehow I am glad that my plans have gone awry. It gives me the opportunity to see you curse yourself.”

“Her sister!” muttered the man unbelievingly. “I have married the child ThÉrÈse. I have held her sister in my arms all these months and never knew. It is a dream. I———”

“Ah, but you have felt, even though———”

He struck the table violently with his fist. His eyes were blazing.

“What manner of woman are you? What were you planning to do to that unhappy boy—her son? Are you a fiend to———”

“In good time, James, you will know what manner of woman I am,” she interrupted quietly. Sinking back in the chair, she resumed the broken strain, all the time watching him through half—closed eyes. “She died ten years ago. Her boy was twelve years old. She never saw him after the night you turned her away from this house. On her death-bed, as she was releasing her pure, undefiled soul to God's keeping, she repeated to the priest who went through the unnecessary form of absolving her, she repeated her solemn declaration that she had never wronged you by thought or deed. I had always believed her, the holy priest believed her, God believed her. You would have believed her, too, James Brood. She was a good woman. Do you hear? And you put a curse upon her and drove her out into the night. That was not all. You persecuted her to the end of her unhappy life. You did that to my sister!”

“And yet you married me,” he muttered thickly.

“Not because I loved you; oh, no! She loved you to the day of her death, after all the misery and suffering you had heaped upon her. No woman ever endured the anguish that she suffered throughout those hungry years. You kept her child from her. You denied him to her, even though you denied him to yourself. Why did you keep him from her? She was his mother. She had borne him; he was all hers. But no! It was your revenge to deprive her of the child she had brought into the world. You worked deliberately in this plan to crush what little there was left in life for her.

“You kept him with you, though you branded him with a name I cannot utter; you guarded him as if he were your most precious possession, and not a curse to your pride; you did this because you knew that you could drive the barb more deeply into her tortured heart. You allowed her to die, after years of pleading, after years of vain endeavour, without one glimpse of her boy, without ever having heard the word mother on his lips. That is what you did to my sister. For twelve long years you gloated over her misery. Man, man, how I hated you when I married you!” She paused, breathless.

“You are creating an excuse for your devilish conduct!” he exclaimed harshly. “You are like Matilde, false to the core. You married me for the luxury I could provide, notwithstanding the curse I had put upon your sister. I don't believe a word of what you are saying to———”

“Don't you believe that I am her sister?”

“You, yes; I must believe that. Why have I been so blind? You are the little ThÉrÈse, and you hated me in those other days. I remember well the———”

“A child's despairing hatred because you were taking away the being she loved best of all. Will you believe me when I say that my hatred did not endure for long? When her happy, joyous letters came back to us filled with accounts of your goodness, your devotion, I allowed my hatred to die. I forgot that you had robbed me. I came to look upon you as the fairy prince, after all. It was not until she came all the way across the ocean and began to die before our eyes—she was years in dying—it was not until then that I began to hate you with a real, undying hatred.”

“And yet you gave yourself to me!” he cried. “You put yourself in her place! In Heaven's name, what was to be gained by such an act as that?”

“I wanted to take Matilde's boy away from you,” she hurried on, and for the first time her eyes began to waver. “The idea suggested itself to me the night I met you at the comtesse's dinner. It was a wonderful, a tremendous thought that entered my brain. At first my real self revolted, but as time went on the idea became an obsession. I married you, James Brood, for the sole purpose of hurting you in the worst possible way: by having Matilde's son strike you where the pain would be the greatest. Ah, you are thinking that I would have permitted myself to have become his mistress, but you are mistaken. I am not that bad. I would not have damned his soul in that way. I would not have betrayed my sister in that way. Far more subtle was my design. I confess that it was my plan to make him fall in love with me and in the end to run away with him, leaving you to think that the very worst had happened. But it would not have been as you think. He would have been protected, my friend, amply protected. He———”

“But you would have wrecked him; don't you see that you would have wrecked the life you sought to protect? How blind and unfeeling you were. You say that he was my son and Matilde's, honestly born. What was your object, may I inquire, in striking me at such cost to him? You would have made a scoundrel of him for the sake of a personal vengeance. Are you forgetting that he regarded himself as my son?”

“No; I do not forget, James. There was but one way in which I could hope to steal him away from you, and I went about it deliberately, with my eyes open. I came here to induce him to run away with me. I would have taken him back to his mother's home, to her grave, and there I would have told him what you did to her. If, after hearing my story, he elected to return to the man who had destroyed his mother, I should have stepped aside and offered no protest.

“But I would have taken him away from you in the manner that would have hurt you the worst. My sister was true to you. I would have been just as true, and after you had suffered the torments of hell, it was my plan to reveal everything to you. But you would have had your punishment by that time. When you were at the very end of your strength, when you trembled on the edge of oblivion, then I would have hunted you out and laughed at you and told you the truth. But you would have had years of anguish—years, I say.”

“I have already had years of agony, pray do not overlook that fact,” said he. “I suffered for twenty years. I was at the edge of oblivion more than once, if it is a pleasure for you to hear me say it, ThÉrÈse.”

“It does not offset the pain that her suffering brought to me. It does not counterbalance the unhappiness you gave to her boy, nor the stigma you put upon him. I am glad that you suffered. It proves to me that you secretly considered yourself to be in the wrong. You doubted yourself. You were never sure, and yet you crushed the life out of her innocent, bleeding heart. You let her die without a word to show that you———”

“I was lost to the world for years,” he said. “There were many years when I was not in touch with———”

“But her letters must have reached you. She wrote a thousand of————”

“They never reached me,” he said significantly.

“You ordered them to be destroyed?” she cried in sudden comprehension.

“I must decline to answer that question.”

She gave him a curious, incredulous smile and then abruptly returned to her charge.

“When my sister came home, degraded, I was nine years of age, but I was not so young that I did not know that a dreadful thing had happened to her. She was blighted beyond all hope of recovery. It was to me, little me, that she told her story over and over again, and it was I to whom she read all of the pitiful letters she wrote to you. My father wanted to come to America to kill you. He did come later on to plead with you and to kill you if you would not listen to him. But you had gone—to Africa, they said. I could not understand why you would not give to her that little baby boy. He was hers, and———”

She stopped short in her recital and covered her eyes with her hands. He waited for her to go on, sitting as rigid as the image that faced him from beyond the table's end.

“Afterward my father and my uncles made every effort to get the child away from you, but he was hidden; you know how carefully he was hidden so that she might never find him. For ten years they searched for him, and you. For ten years she wrote to you, begging you to let her have him, if only for a little while at a time. She promised to restore him to you. You never replied. You scorned her. We were rich, very rich. But our money was of no help to us in the search for her boy. You had secreted him too well. At last, one day, she told me what it was that you accused her of doing. She told me about Guido Feverelli, her music-master. I knew him, James. He had known her from childhood. He was one of the finest men I have ever seen.”

“He was in love with her,” grated Brood.

“Perhaps. Who knows? But if so, he never uttered so much as one word of love to her. He challenged you. Why did you refuse to fight him?”

“Because she begged me not to kill him. Did she tell you that?”

“Yes. But that was not the real reason. It was because you were not sure of your ground.”

“I deny that!”

“Never mind! It is enough that poor Feverelli passed out of her life. She did not see him again until just before she died. He was a noble gentleman. He wrote but one letter to her after that wretched day in this house. I have it here in this packet.”

She drew a package of letters, tied with a white ribbon, from her bosom and laid it upon the table before him.

“But one letter from him,” she went on. “I have brought it here for you to read. But not now. There are other letters and documents here for you to consider. They are from the grave. Ah, I do not wonder that you shrink and draw back from them. They convict you, James.”

“Now I can see why you have taken up this fight against me. You—you knew she was innocent,” he said in a low, unsteady voice.

“And why I have hated you, aÏe? But what you do not understand is how I could have brought myself to the point of loving you.”

“Loving me! Good Heaven, woman, what do you———”

“Loving you in spite of myself,” she cried, beating upon the table with her hands. “I have tried to convince myself that it was not I, but the spirit of Matilde that had come to lodge in my treacherous body. I hated you for myself and I loved you for Matilde. She loved you to the end. She never hated you. That was it. The pure, deathless love of Matilde was constantly fighting against the hatred I bore for you. I believe as firmly as I believe that I am alive that she has been near me all the time, battling against my insane desire for vengeance. You have only to recall to yourself the moments when you were so vividly reminded of Matilde Valeska. At those times I am sure that something of Matilde was in me. I was not myself. You have looked into my eyes a thousand times with a question in your own. Your soul was striving to reach the soul of Matilde. Ah, all these months I have known that you love Matilde, not me. You loved Matilde that was in me. You———”

“I have thought of her, always of her, when you were in my arms.”

“I know how well you loved her,” she declared slowly. “I know that you went to her tomb long after her death was revealed to you. I know that years ago you made an effort to find Feverelli. You found his grave, too, and you could not ask him, man to man, if you had wronged her. But in spite of all that you brought up her boy to be sacrificed as———”

“I—I—am I to believe you? If he should be my son!” he cried, starting up, cold with dread.

“He is your son. He could be no other man's son. I have her dying word for it. She declared it in the presence of her God. Wait! Where are you going?”

“I am going down to him!”

“Not yet, James. I have still more to say to you, more to confess. Here! Take this package of letters. Read them as you sit beside his bed—not his death-bed, for I shall restore him to health, never fear. If he were to die I should curse myself to the end of time, for I and I alone would have been the cause. Here are her letters, and the one Feverelli wrote to her. This is her death-bed letter to you. And this is a letter to her son and yours. You may some day read it to him. And here—this is a document requiring me to share my fortune with her son. It is a pledge that I took before my father died a few years ago. If the boy ever appeared he was to have his mother's share of the estate, and it is not an inconsiderable amount, James. He is independent of you. He need ask nothing of you. I was taking him home to his own.”

She shrank slightly as he stood over her. There was more of wonder and pity in his face than condemnation. She looked for the anger she had expected to arouse in him, and was dumbfounded to see that it was not revealed in his steady, appraising eyes.

“Your plan deserved a better fate than this, Yv—ThÉrÈse. It was prodigious! I—I can almost pity you.”

“Have you no pain, no regret, no grief?” she cried weakly.

“Yes,” he said, controlling himself with difficulty. “Yes, I know all these and more.” He picked up the package of letters and glanced at the superscription on the outer envelope. Suddenly he raised them to his lips and, with his eyes closed, kissed the words that were written there. Her head drooped and a sob came into her throat. She did not look up until he began speaking to her again, quietly, even patiently.

“But why should you, even in your longing for revenge, have planned to humiliate and degrade him even more than I could have done? Was it just to your sister's son that you should blight his life, that you should turn him into a skulking, sneaking betrayer? What would you have gained in the end? His loathing, his scorn. ThÉrÈse, did you not think of all this?”

“I have told you that I thought of everything. I was mistaken. I did not stop to think that I would be taking him away from happiness in the shape of love that he might bear for someone else. I did not know that there was a Lydia Desmond. When I came to know my heart softened and my purpose lost most of its force. He would have been safe with me, but would he have been happy? I could not give him the kind of love that Lydia promised. I could only be his mother's sister to him. He was not in love with me. He has always loved Lydia. I fascinated him, just as I fascinated you. He would not have gone away with me, even after you had told him that he was not your son. He would not do that to you, James, in spite of the blow you struck him. He was loyal to Lydia and to himself.”

“And what did he think of you?” demanded Brood scornfully.

“If you had not come upon us here he would have known me for who I am, and he would have forgiven me. I had asked him to go away with me. He refused. Then I was about to tell him the whole story of my life, of his life, and of yours. Do you think he would have refused forgiveness to me? No! He would have understood.”

“But up to that hour he thought of you as—what shall I say?”

“A bad woman? Perhaps. I did not care. It was part of the price I was to pay in advance. I would have told him everything as soon as the ship on which we sailed was outside the harbour yonder. That was my intention, and I know you believe me when I say that there was nothing more in my mind. Time would have straightened everything out for him. He could have had his Lydia, even though he went away with me. Once away from here, do you think that he would ever return? No! Even though he knew you to be his father, he would not forget that he has never been your son. You have hurt him since he was a babe. Would he forget? Would he forgive? No! When you came into this room and found us, I was about to go down on my knees to him to thank him for saving me from my own designs. I realised then, as I had come to suspect in the past few months, that I had not counted on my own conscience.

“James, I—I would not have carried out my plan. I had faltered, and my cause was lost. What have I accomplished? Am I able to gloat over you? What have I wrought, after all? I weakened under the love she bore for you, I permitted it to creep in and fill my heart. Do you understand? I do not hate you now. It is something to know that you have worshipped her all these years. You were true to her. What you did long, long ago was not your fault. You believed that she had wronged you. But you went on loving her. That is what weakened my resolve. You loved her to the end, she loved you to the end. Well, in the face of that, could I go on hating you? You must have been worthy of her love. She knew you better than all the world. You came to me with love for her in your heart. You took me, and you loved her all the time. I am not sure, James, that you are not entitled to this miserable, unhappy love I have come to feel for you—my own love, not Matilde's.”

“You are saying this so that I may refrain from throwing you out into the street———”

“No!” she cried, coming to her feet. “I shall ask nothing of you. If I am to go, it shall be because I have failed. I have been a blind, vainglorious fool. The trap has caught me instead of you, and I shall take the consequences. I have lost everything!”

“You have lost everything,” said he steadily.

“'You despise me?”

“I cannot ask you to stay here after this.”

“But I shall not go. I have a duty to perform before I leave this house. I intend to save the life of that poor boy downstairs, so that he may not die believing me to be an evil woman, a faithless wife. Thank God, I have accomplished something! You know that he is your son. You know that my sister was as pure as snow. You know that you killed her, and that she loved you in spite of the death you brought to her. That is something.”

Brood dropped into the chair and buried his face on his quivering arms. In muffled tones came the cry from his soul:

“They've all said that he is like me. I have seen it at times, but I would not believe. I fought against it resolutely, madly, cruelly! Now it is too late and I see! I see, I feel! You curse of mankind, you have driven me to the killing of my own son!”

She stood over him, silent for a long time, her hand hovering above his head.

“He is not going to die,” she said at last, when she was sure that she had full command of her voice. “I can promise you that, James. I shall not go from this house until he is well. I shall nurse him to health and give him back to you and Matilde, for now I know that he belongs to both of you and not to her alone. Now, James, you may go down to him. He is not conscious. He will not hear you praying at his bedside. He———”

A knock came at the door—a sharp, imperative knock. It was repeated several times before either of them could summon the courage to call out. They were petrified with the dread of something that awaited them beyond the closed door. It was she who finally called out:

“Come in!”

Dr Hodder, coatless and bare-armed, came into the room.