gaping listeners without--"at last, Sir Jasper Kingsland! At last we
meet again!"

There was a horrible cry as the baronet started back, putting up both
hands, with a look of unutterable horror.

"Good God! Zenith!"

"Yes, Zenith!" shrieked the woman; "Zenith, the beautiful, once!
Zenith, the hag, the crone, the madwoman, now! Look at me well, Sir
Jasper Kingsland--for the ruin is your own handiwork!"

He stood like a man paralyzed--speechless, stunned--his face the livid
hue of death.

The wretched woman stood before him with streaming hair, blazing eyes,
and uplifted arm, a very incarnate fury.

"Look at me well!" she fiercely shrieked, tossing her locks of old off
her fiery face. "Am I like the Zenith of twenty years ago--young and
beautiful, and bright enough even for the fastidious Englishman to
love? Look at me now--ugly and old, wrinkled and wretched, deserted
and despised--and tell me if I have not greater reason to hate you than
ever woman had to hate man?"

She tossed her arms aloft with a madwoman's shriek--crying out her
words in a long, wild scream.

"I hate you--I hate you! Villain! dastard! perjured wretch! I hate
you, and I curse you, here in the church you call holy! I curse you