The elaborate structure of deceit which they had so carefully reared around the blind man was crumbling, even now.  If he recovered his sight, it must inevitably fall.  He would know, in an instant of revelation, that Miriam was old and ugly and not beautiful, as she had foolishly led him to believe, years ago, when he asked how much time had changed her.  She looked pitifully at her hands, rough and knotted and red through untiring slavery for him and his.

She and Barbara would be sacrificed—­no, for he would forgive Barbara anything.  She was the only one who would lose through his restored vision, unless Constance might, in some way, be revealed to him as she was.

"I do not quite trust Miriam.  She loved your father and I took him away from her." The cruel sentences moved crazily before her as in letters of fire.

The letter was gone.  Ambrose North would never see the evidence of Constance’s distrust of her, nor come, without warning, upon Miriam’s pitiful secret which, with a woman’s pride, she would hide from him at all costs.  None the less, Constance had stabbed her again.  A ghostly hand clutching a dagger had suddenly come up from the grave, and the thrust of the cold, keen steel had been very sure.

[Sidenote:  Scheming Miriam]

For twenty years and more, she had been tempted to read to the blind man the letter Constance had written to Laurence Austin just before she died.  For that length of time, her desire to blacken Constance, in the hope that the grief-stricken heart might once more turn to her, had warred with her love and her woman’s fear of hurting the one she loved.  To-night, even in the face of the letter to Barbara, she knew that she should never have courage to read it to him, nor even to give it to him with her own hands.

In case he recovered his sight, she might leave it where he would find it.  She was glad, now, that the envelope was torn, for he would not be apt to open a letter addressed to another, even though Constance had penned the superscription and the man to whom it was addressed was dead.  His fine sense of honour would, undoubtedly, lead him to burn it.  But, if the letter were in a plain envelope, sealed, and she should leave it on his dresser, he would be very sure to open it, if he saw it lying there, and then——­

Miriam smiled.  Constance would be paid at last for her theft of another woman’s suitor, for her faithlessness and her cowardly desertion.  There was a heavy score against Constance, who had so belied the meaning of her name, and the twenty years had added compound interest.  North might not—­probably would not—­turn again to Miriam after all these years; she saw that plainly to-night for the first time, but he would, at any rate, see that he had given up the gold for the dross.

Miriam got her work-box and began to mend the coat lining.  She had not known that it was torn.  She wondered how he would feel when he discovered that the precious letter was lost.  Would he blame Barbara—­or her?