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294 claimed the affection which should have been mine, and who finally robbed me of my lover!" The woman had been muttering, but now her voice rose to a rasping scream. "For I loved him, do you hear? I loved Halsey Chalmers, and she took him from me!"

"Oh, stop her!" moaned Gene, burying his face in his hands. "I can't bear it!"

"Silence!" Odell commanded in a low, penetrating tone.

"Let her go on!"

Effie Meade broke into a soft, crooning laugh, more horrible than her wild shrieks had been; and when she spoke again her voice had sunk to a mutter once more.

"I attended her at her marriage to the man who should have been mine; I was present at the coming of her children; mine too, though my arms were empty! And all the time I hated her and waited! Waited! Then the baby, the one that was most like him, I—I let it fall from my arms, and it became a cripple, a curse! I could have killed myself from grief, but I lived because I had a double purpose now. She, who could endure nothing but beauty around her, turned in loathing from this maimed thing of her flesh; but I loved the little one as much as I hated her and all the other miserable puppets she had brought into the world; and I meant to see that he had everything, everything which she had hoped to give the rest!"

"You fiend!" Rannie started from his chair; but Odell forced him gently back, and Effie Meade gurgled as if he had called her an endearing name.

"He died, the man she had taken from me, and she married again, but I didn't care; it meant just so much