His Other Wife: A Novel — page 249: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CIN DURANCE “VILE,” 247 With that instinct of secrecy that animates a panther in its advances on its prey, Rachel had purposely concealed from Croft the extent and the nature of the evidences of his crime which she claimed to have in her possession. — She had only deduced such testimony as convinced him that she was in reality aware of his nefarious deed, and the exact manner of its perpetration, but carefully withheld from him the channel through which she had arrived at the knowledge. Whether her witnesses were living beings, or only those mute but sometimes more awful accusers that rise up like ghostly fiends, with glittering masks upon their silent faces, to confront the criminal, and which are known as circumstantial evidence, he could not even conjecture. During that private interview which follcwed the sudden apparition and horrid revelation by which the outraged and presumably dead wife set the living wife forever asun- der from the man who had foully wronged them both, Rachel had evidently convinced Croft that his wisest, safest, and simplest course was to accept her terms without demur. Some occult power of inspiration seemed to have en-_ tered the mind of this dull-brained, commonplace wo- man, who had for years been the down-trodden slave of one all-absorbing passion. The moment that silent tyranny of a great, unreason- | ing love was removed from her faculties, they burned up like smoldered flames, and lit all the horizon of her life Eomicbooks: (E(0) im =)