“I felt as if the fates had favored me when I heard that he had died without making his will, and I knew from the fact that you were known only as his niece, Miss Mona Montague, that you must still be in ignorance of your real relationship toward him.  So it was comparatively easy for me to establish my claim to his property.  I did not appear personally in the matter, for I was leading quite a brilliant career here as Mrs. Richmond Montague, and I did not wish to figure as the discarded wife of Walter Dinsmore, so no one save Mr. Corbin even suspected my identity.  If Walter Dinsmore had never written that miserable confession, or if I had at once turned all his property into money and gone abroad, or to California, I need never have been brought to this.  As matters stand now, however, I suppose you will claim everything,” she concluded, with a sullen frown.

Mona thought that if the law had its course with her she would need but very little of the ill-gotten wealth upon which she had been flourishing so extravagantly of late.  But she simply replied, in a cold, resolute tone: 

“I certainly feel that I am entitled to the property which my father wished me to have.”

“Indeed! then you have changed your mind since the night when you so indignantly affirmed to Louis that you did not wish to profit by so much as a dollar from the man who had so wronged your mother,” sneered her companion, bitterly.

“Certainly,” calmly returned Mona, “now that I know the truth.  My father did my mother no willful wrong, although in his morbid grief and sensitiveness he imputed such wrong to himself, and never ceased to reproach himself for it.  You alone,” Mona continued, with stern denunciation, “are guilty of the ruin of their happiness and lives; you alone will have to answer for it.  You have been a very wicked woman, Mrs. Montague, not only in connection with your schemes regarding them, but in your corruption of the morals of your nephew.  I should suppose your conscience would never cease to reproach you for having reared him to such a life of crime.  You will have to answer for that also.”

Mrs. Montague shivered visibly at these words, thus betraying that she was not altogether indifferent to her accountability.

But she quickly threw off the feeling, or the outward appearance of it, and tossing her head defiantly, she remarked: 

“I do not know who has made you my mentor, Miss Dinsmore; but there is one thing more that I wish you to explain to me—­how came that detective to be in my house?”

“He was passing in the street, and I asked him to come in,” Mona replied.

“Indeed! and where, pray, did you make the acquaintance of the high-toned Mr. Rider?” sarcastically inquired Mrs. Montague.

“In St. Louis.”

“In St. Louis!” the woman repeated, astonished.

“Yes.  You doubtless remember the day that I rode with you and your nephew in the street-car, when you were both disguised.”