ade no answer, but a look of more dogged defiance came into his
face.

"It can never be, and yet I think it is so. Can it be possible that
Madame Vanira is the--the dairy-maid to whom you gave your young
affections?"

"Madame Vanira is the girl I loved, mother, and whom I believed to be my
wife--until you parted us."

And my lady fell back in her carriage with a low cry of "Heaven have
mercy on us!"

CHAPTER LV.

"WAR TO THE KNIFE."

Lucia, Countess of Lanswell, was in terrible trouble, and it was the
first real trouble of her life. Her son's marriage had been rather a
difficulty than a trouble--a difficulty that the law had helped her
over. Now no law could intervene, and no justice. Nothing could exceed
her surprise in finding Madame Vanira, the Queen of Song, the most
beautiful, the most gifted woman in England, positively the
"dairy-maid," "the tempestuous young person," the artful, designing girl
from whom by an appeal to the strong arm of the law she had saved her
son. She paused in wonder to think to herself what would have happened
if the marriage had not been declared null and void. In that case, she
said to herself, with a shrug of the shoulders, in all probability the
girl would not have taken to the stage at all. She wondered that she had
not sooner recognized her. She remembered the strong, dramatic passion
with which Leone had threatened her. "She was born an actress," said my
lady to herself, with a sneer. She determined within herself that the
secret should be kept, that to no one living would she reveal the fact
that the great actress was the girl whom the law had parted from her
son.

Lord Chandos, the Duke of Lester, the world in general, must never know
this. Lord Chandos must never tell it, neither would she. What was she
to do? A terrible incident had happened--terrible to her on whose life
no shadow rested. Madame Vanira had accepted an engagement at Berlin,
the fashionable journals had already announced the time of her
departure, and bemoaned the loss of so much beauty and genius. Lord
Chandos had announced his intention of spending a few months in Berlin,
and his wife would not agree to it.

"You know very well," she said, "that you have but one motive in going
to Berlin, and that is to be near Madame Vanira."

"You have no right to pry into my motives," he replied, angrily; and she
retorted that when a husband's motives lowered his wife, she had every
reason to inquire into