"Oh, madam, I've found Miss Farnham dead in her bed with a bottle of poison by her side!" she almost shrieked.
In a shabby third-story room of a cheap apartment-house in New York, old Miser Farnham was sitting alone. The hideous old man was, if possible, even more forbidding than on that day in Central Park when the unhappy Nita had shuddered at the first sight of him, then yielded to his temptations, and became his reluctant bride.
The leering hideousness of his face a year ago was increased now by several livid scars received in the railway accident that had almost cost him his life, and his stooping frame was lean and gaunt, his shabby clothing hanging loosely on him.
Thin, grizzled locks straggled over his brow under the worn old hat that he wore habitually in-doors and out, and his keen, gray eyes gleamed with a diabolical light of triumph as they scanned the pages of a letter received several days previous from Mrs. Courtney.
"So she is coming home, my lovely bride," he chuckled to himself. "Coming home, and it lacks barely two weeks to the day when I shall claim her for my own. I wonder if she has come to her senses yet, and if she has concluded that life as an old man's darling with unlimited cash is better than the deep, dark river."
"More beautiful than ever, with a score of titled lovers," he read from Mrs. Courtney's sycophantic letter. "Ha, ha! to think of carrying her off from them all. To think of marrying Juan de Castro's daughter. It is a wonder he does not rise from the grave! Ugh! what if he should"--and he shrank and cowered in sudden fear, whining out--"I do not believe in ghosts."
The miser had one weakness. He believed in the supernatural, and feared it. Many a night he cowered beneath the counterpane, with his hand before his eyes, afraid to look out into the dark lest he encounter some menacing ghost from a wicked past.
The old man had reached the acme of his plans and hopes and ambitions. His marriage to Nita had secured things that else were doubtful. Let her but come now willingly or unwillingly to his arms, and the triumph of his life would be achieved.
He chuckled in fiendish glee, remembering these things, and thinking of the life he would lead with Nita, for he determined that then he would throw off his miserly habits and live in splendor.