Page:The Fate of Fenella (1892).djvu/332

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F. ANSTEY.
317

Lucille's slender wrists, "but you're the party we're after. You have given us the slip often enough, but I think we've got you safe this time."

Mme. de Vigny's face changed; for an instant she seemed to contemplate resistance, and then she submitted to the inevitable, and followed her captors to the door. On the threshold she paused and looked back with a gaze of concentrated hate upon the party. "Bah!" she ejaculated, and then, with an indescribable gesture of defiant contempt, she walked out of the room, and out of the lives her baleful influence had done so much to perturb.

As soon as she was gone, Frank, with a sudden recollection, inquired, "And the boy, our Ronny, Fenella? He is not ill—not again? Tell me the worst. I—I can bear it!"

"Ronny," said Fenella, with one of her little spasms of silent mirth, "Ronny is quite well; only he insisted in driving up to the door in a goat chaise. What is the matter, Frank—you are not unwell?"

"No," said Frank faintly, "no, only the dread of some new disaster. We have gone through so many!"

"They are all over now," she said, sweetly and confidently, "all over. Ronny will be here soon, and then we three will live here happily together, and poor Mr. Jacynth, whose time I am afraid I