Jewel watched her victim eagerly, breathlessly.
She saw the hue of death overspread the lovely, wasted face, the blue
eyes, already dim through the tears that had washed their brightness
away, dilate in wonder and horror. Oh, how sweet it was to see that
look of mortal agony on the face that Laurie Meredith had loved to
kiss! Jewel said to herself that in the months since he went away, she
had made her successful rival shed a thousand tears for each and every
kiss he had pressed on those lovely, rosebud lips.
But her thirst for revenge was not sated yet. There was yet another
sweet draught waiting for her lips in the near future.
All this time she had been keeping up the correspondence with Laurie
Meredith, in order to prevent him from coming back South to see Flower.
But she said to herself that when the girl was dead she would cease
writing. He would become uneasy then, and the chances were that he
would soon come back. Then she, the girl he had slighted, she would
show him his wife's grave.
What sweetness there was in this thought for Jewel! She gloated over
it often, and thought that surely no girl had ever had a more perfect
revenge for slighted love than she had taken.
Her thoughts went further yet sometimes.
She had taken the greatest pains to hide her enmity to her sister.
There was no one who could say she had been unkind to Flower; Laurie
Meredith should never know otherwise, and from her reputed tenderness
to his dead wife, and her sweet sympathy with himself, should spring up
another flower of love that should bloom for her alone. Some day she
would be his wife, and the secret of all she had done to part him from
Flower should be buried forever in the poor girl's grave.
She could see nothing to mar the success of her far-reaching plans.
With Flower dead, and her mother the inmate of an insane asylum,
she would be her own mistress, with quite a handsome fortune at her
command, and she intended to make capital of her liberty and her
position.
True, the physician had said that her mother's reason would most
probably return within a few months, but Jewel had made up her mind
that the foolish, half-mad creature should never leave the asylum
again. For so young a girl she was wonderfully clever and headstrong,
and she was fully determined to have her own way.
With all these thoughts in her mind she stood watching Flower reading
those few brief lines, and she was not surprised when with one low
cry of anguish the unhappy girl let the paper slip from her nerveless
hands, and fell back in a heavy swoon upon the pillow.
Jewel laughed as she looked at the still, white face, and moved toward
the door.
"I will walk up and down the hall and get some fresh air while she
recovers at her leisure," she said, aloud; and she stepped outside and
went to the hall window, which was open, letting in a flood of balmy
air, sweet with the heavy scent of the early blooming lilacs.
She leaned her elbows on the window-ledge and looked out at the
beautiful tides of the sea rolling into the shore with a hollow murmur,
while the moon's bright rays made silver paths across the restless
waves. But Jewel shivered, and exclaimed:
"But for him I should be dead, drowned in that cruel sea! He saved my
life, and I dedicated it to him. I made him the king of my heart! Oh,
why did she come between us? If I am wicked it is all her fault. She
drove me mad."
Absorbed in her angry self-excuses, it was almost half an hour before
she returned to the room she had left, and then she found Flower lying
just as she had left her, cold and apparently rigid, with no movement
at her heart.
Jewel could not repress a low cry of horror. She was only a girl, and
wicked as she was, she was frightened when she saw that life had fled
from the body of her she had so cruelly tortured.
She felt Flower's hands and they were deadly cold; she shouted in
her ear and she did not respond. Then running into her own room, she
brought out a pitcher of fresh water, which she poured over Flower's
head and face in a perfect deluge.
But not a sigh, not the movement of an eyelash rewarded her efforts at
resuscitation. With something like awe she began to realize that her
work was completed sooner than she had expected. Flower was already
dead.
She flung wide the door and began to scream loudly for the servants.
Her voice rang wildly down the long halls and dim stairways, returning
to her in ghostly echoes; but no one answered to her wild calls. The
servants had stolen away to a merry-making in the town.
Something of the truth began to dawn upon her mind when she had shouted
herself hoarse.
"They are either stolen away or fast asleep," she muttered, and rushed
down-stairs to their quarters in the yard.
The cottage door was locked, and Jewel pounded lustily without
receiving any reply. Looking at the windows, she saw that they were
closed and dark.
"The wretches! how dared they go away and leave me with that dead
girl?" she muttered, ignoring the fact that Flower had been alive a
little while ago. The deep, hoarse baying of the watch-dog, aroused in
his distant kennel by the noise she had made, caused her to start and
crouch down shivering on the back door-step.
"I shall stay here till they come. I--I--can not watch by that dead
girl alone!" she muttered, with a superstitious horror of death.
* * * * *
But in the meantime the copious shower of water she had poured over
Flower had taken effect.
While Jewel was battering at the door of the servants' quarters Flower
had revived and found the door wide open, and such a draught of sweet,
pure air rushing into the room that it seemed to endow her with new
life.
She dragged herself wearily into the hall and heard Jewel's angry voice
berating the servants down in the yard. She instantly suspected the
true state of the case.
"She thinks I am dead, and wishes to arouse the servants. I must try
to escape before she returns," she moaned, faintly, and made her way
down-stairs like a spirit, slipped the bolt of the front door, and let
herself out, friendless and homeless, into the dark.