Page:The Fate of Fenella (1892).djvu/178

 CHAPTER XIV.

DERELICT.

Lord Francis found himself in the train on his way up to London from Felixstowe his mind was in a condition bordering on frenzy. The wife of his youth, the wife of his choice, the only woman to whom his heart had ever gone forth with unalloyed joy and limitless bounty, lay at death's door, from which one hope existed of beckoning her back—the touch of their child's tiny hand. And now, at this moment of supreme crisis, cursed Fate stepped in and took the child from his sight, snatched the possible deliverer from his arms!

Cursed Fate, or Nemesis, or lex talionis, call it what one might, there was the maddening fact, the overwhelming act of that foreign woman whom once, in his malignant perversity, he thought he loved, who over and over again swore she loved him and only him! Granted he had treated her badly, had he attempted her life? Why, then, should she attempt his? Why should she seek to kill him through the hearts he 163