"I am Lord Cecil Strathmore. Can I see your mistress ?" She hesitated, and looked uncertain.

"I

suppose so, my lord-if so be as you wish

"I desire to see her, now.”

The woman noticed that his voice was hoarse, seeming to tremble slightly, and, in obedience rather to that sign than to his desire or his rank, fell back to let him pass into the room.

"Will you walk hither, then, if you please, my lord ?"

"Here?"

He followed her, wondering at the place chosen, into the dimly lit bedchamber, that to him looked as deserted as the rest of the dwelling. The woman preceded him, herself strangely silent and subdued, and drawing aside the muslin curtains of a bed which stood, in foreign mode, in an alcove, motioned him thither, without a word, to her side.

At the gesture he paused involuntarily.

"Good God! is she ill?"

The servant looked at him surprised, and her voice sank to a whisper : "Ill? I thought your lordship knew she died at dawn to-day ?" "Dead!"

The word rattled in his throat, he staggered back against the wall, and leaned there, his face covered, his breath thick and laboured: another life lay heavy on his soul!

a

"A few weeks ago, my lord," went on the woman, while her voice faltered and thick with tears, grew letter came from Paris-leastways, it was that post-mark-with a strange writing on the envelope, and inside of it another letter from Major Erroll. Mademoiselle Lucille read the note from my master first, and as she read her face grew scared and awful, with a piteous look in her eyes, like a lamb's they're leading to slaughter. She seized the letter it had come in, and her eyes had scarce fell on it before she gave a cry like a death-cry, my lord, and sunk down, all cold and senseless and crouched together."

The woman's voice stopped with a low gasping sob.

"We did all we could, my lord-indeed we did; but the minute the doctor see her, he said as there was no hope; that a sudden shock had shattered her brain, and that the cruelest thing to wish for her was life. Oh, my lord! and so young as she was! She never knew any one of us again, not even the child, but lay there, weeks through, with no sense or sight in her beautiful eyes. She sank slowly of sheer exhaustion, fading off like a flower. And, at length, at sunrise this morning she died. I suppose your lordship will know what has chanced to my master? His letter that she held clenched in her hand, the doctor took and locked up with other papers, but that in the strange handwriting was left, and I made bold to read it. It came from a gentleman, who wrote that Major Erroll had been shot in some duel at Paris, and had bade him as wrote it enclose that letter to Mademoiselle de Vocqsal if he fell. I know nothing else, my lord; I only know that the news killed my mistress."

She ceased; and each of her homely words struck like steel to the heart of her hearer, staining his soul with the guilt of two lives blotted out by his hand from the Living. DEAD! Had he known her and loved her well, the word could scarce have echoed more hideously in his ears than now, when it met him on the threshold mocking the atonement that he came

to offer, and striking paralysed and powerless the soul which, in its presumption, had thought to strike the balance with its sin, and cover crime by costless expiation. DEAD! He leaned against the wall, with his head bowed in silence; the direst agony that racks men in their hours of bereavement was mercy to this man's remorse.

Then he raised his head slowly and moved towards the couch, whilst the woman turned away so that she did not look upon his face; she, who only had heard of his close friendship with the dead man, thought he was moved by grief at his friend's loss, and his rank made his sorrow sacred and unapproachable in her eyes. He drew near the bed, impelled by some resistless impulse to look on the work that he had wrought, urged by that strange self-chastisement which forces us to drink to the uttermost dregs from the cup of retribution. The pale lamp-light fell on the white and delicate couch, fit bier and pall for the early youth thus early smitten to the tomb, and on the bed she lay-dead in the opening summer of her life-dead like a lily rudely broken in its bloom. The love faithful in life was faithful unto death; she had gone to rejoin her husband!

The lifeless form lay there in its ethereal and solemn loveliness, her hands tightly folded on her breast, her eyes closed as though in slumber, bearing no sign of the Destroyer's hand, save in the hue that blanched the lips, on which, even now, a sigh seemed set, a voiceless prayer suspended. And in strange contrast with her mother's mournful and motionless repose, her head pillowed on the heart that had no throb for her, her brow resting on the arm that gave her no embrace, her breath leaving its fresh warmth on the lips that answered her by no caress, lay a young child sleeping. Life in its earliest bud, side by side with Life stricken in its fullest bloom! the light gold locks commingling with the dark unbound waves of her mother's hair, the flushed cheek, with its rose-leaf hue, lying against the one now colourless and cold, the soft and dreamless sleep of childhood beside the chill and hopeless slumber of the tomb.

"The child would not leave her, my lord," whispered the woman. "She sobbed herself to sleep there trying to waken her mother, and I had not the heart to stir her. Poor orphan! she is but an infant; only two years old, and a love-child! What will become of her!"

"Her future shall be my care."

His voice sounded dull and hoarse in his own ear as he answered the brief words; standing there, the hideous mockery of the atonement he had come to offer seemed to arise and jibe and gibber in his face before the holy hush of death, and the hand of God seemed stretched to sever him from those whom he had slain, and bid him stand aloof, alone on earth, with no companion save his crime.

He was too late! TOO LATE!

The words seemed wailing through the air-the eternal requiem of every sin; and as he stood there, with his head bowed in the faint lamplight of the chamber of death, the young child, waking from her sleep, stirred as from some joyous dream, and pushed her fair hair from her eyes, and laughed up in innocence and gladness in his face. With an involuntary gesture he spurned her from him as though some accursed thing had crossed his vision:-her lips wore her father's smile.

Stricken by that look as by the sword of an avenging angel, he turned and went out into the silent night; and in his ear the ceaseless

moaning of the distant seas, and the weary cry of the winds, wandering and without rest, followed in his path with one eternal wail-" Too late! Too late!"

IV.

66 GOOD AND EVIL AS TWO TWINS CLEAVING TOGETHER."

"You drink the bitterness of Remorse? Taste the sweetness of Revenge."

The words stole softly to his ear in the stillness as he paced down the ruined cloisters of the Abbey, breaking in on the far-off lulling of the seas and the hoot of the night-birds near. They pierced so strangely to the secret of his thoughts, broke in so suddenly on the solitude, in which no living thing was near him, that he started and looked up with, for one instant, what in a weaker man might have been akin to superstition. The fitful moonlight, slanting greyly in through the low pointed arches, fell across the figure of a woman leaning against the moss-grown pillar of the cloister-side; and in the dress, worn something as Arabs wear their garments, with the vivid colours which marked her tribe, and in the profound melancholy of the Sclavonian features, he recognised the Bohemian Redempta, who thus crossed his path for the third time like some fixed recurrent fate.

His steps were involuntarily arrested, and he paused, looking at her in the moonlight, whilst her gaze steadily met his, without boldness yet without fear, with something compassionate in its mournful fixity; and as she moved forward where a brighter streak of the moon-rays fell, he saw that the olive-bronze of her cheek had paled, and that her deep-set eyes were alit with a luminous gleam.

"Well!" she said, slowly, "does the kiss burn like poison now? Was sin born of the love, and a crime of the sin, and a bitter curse of the crime? Were the words of Redempta aright?"

He flung her out of his path with unconscious violence; the passions that were at work within him made this mocking travesty of them seem scarce so much insult as jibe.

"Out of my way, woman-devil-whichever you are!" "More devil than woman, for,. like you, I hate !"

The answer came slowly and bitterly from her lips with menacing meaning; the ferocity of his grasp and his words seemed to have swept unnoticed over her, and to have stirred her no more than the sweep of the forest wind past her cheek. Her intonation caught his ear, and he turned and looked more closely at her features, on which were written the dark passions of the Sclavonic character, masked by that melancholy composure natural to the Eastern blood which mingled in her veins. He saw that this woman's words were not the offspring of charlatanry if they might be those of a maniac's wanderings, and he paused, instinctively drawn by the fate which seemed to have interwoven her knowledge and her actions with his own. Of that moment's pause she seized advantage, and leaned towards him, changing her slow and imperfect English for her own swift, mellow Czeschen.

"Listen! You are an English noble, rich and full of power-I a

wandering Czec, whom your laws call a tramp and your scorn calls a vagrant, and yet-yet-listen! I, the daughter of Phara, the gispy, can give you what your wealth cannot buy nor your power command-I can give you your vengeance!"

By the faint yellow light she saw in his eyes rise the steel-like glitter of his dangerous wrath as he thrust her back.

"You are mad, or an impostor! Let me pass, woman! I am in no mood for fooling!"

A smile bitter as his own crossed her face, and she did not move from his path.

"Am I? Look in my face and see! Listen first, my lord, ere you judge! If the words of Redempta were error that she spoke to you long ago in Bohemia, then say she speaks falsely now;-if you did not find, as she foretold to you a brief while since in France, that your love, changed to hatred, will know no rest for its throes till it is slaked in revenge, then believe that she lies to you now. But if you found these things true, then judge her by them: as true is her hatred for her whom you hate, as sure is her power to point you your vengeance. Say! were they truth or error? Say!"

She waited for his answer, and he was silent, where she stood fronting him in the dim moonlight of the ruined cloister; a bitter wrath was in his eyes, a haughty menace on his lips, but the melodious appealing voice of the Bohemian carried its own conviction, and in a measure disarmed his anger; her words struck too closely home to the curse he bore within him to be heard idly or with scorn, and the soul of this man, in whom much that was great commingled with dark and evil crimes, was too instinctively true to itself and to others to sully itself by a lie even to a beggar. She saw the advantage gained, and pursued it, her voice growing swifter, and sunk to a whisper, whilst the untutored poetry of her natural speech lent dignity, almost solemnity, to the Bohemian tongue in which she spoke.

Listen,

They were truth!—and you have known their bitterness. then! I have followed you here to your own country to be heard, for what you vainly seek I can point out, what I vainly crave you can work. Listen! The worm burrows, where the tiger cannot reach; the tiger tears and rends to death, where the worm would be trampled and crushed under foot; let them both work together! Will you hold your revenge in your own grasp, to let its blow fall, slowly, surely, sharply, at what hour you will?-will you shatter the jewels from her breast, the smile from her lips, the laughter from her eyes, the world from her feet? -will you hold her fate in your grip, meting it out at your will, crushing all that wanton loveliness which has betrayed you, as you might crush this velvet-painted moth in your hand? If you will, then, my lord, listen to the words of Redempta, who, though ahungered and athirst, a wanderer on the earth, without home or people, poor, and stricken, and desolate, will ask no reward of you save one-one!-to see her suffer!"

Her voice sank lower and lower, stealing out in the hushed night with a terrible and ghastly meaning; her hand clenched unconsciously upon his arm, her eyes gleamed with a lurid thirsty light, and the immutable and melancholy calm that veiled her features, as it veils the faces of the Easterns beneath the throes of strong emotion, only lent but a more

deadly strength to the last words than the wildest curse of passion could have carried with them. To doubt her was no longer possible; and he answered her nothing where they stood in the sickly autumn moonlight, the air around them filled with the faint and mournful soughing of the sea, and the lull of the winds among the cloisters of the dead Dominicans. "To see her suffer!"

It was the lust of his own soul-this merciless and brutal longing to draw within his grasp the vile and lovely thing who had been his madness and his curse, and watch his vengeance work, and fester, and eat its way into her very soul, whilst he stood calmly by, as men in ancient days stood to watch the lovely limbs of women stretched and broken on the rack. For Strathmore, who had been born pitiless, had now become cruel.

The Bohemian was silent also; she seemed to have lost all memory of his presence or her errand; and when she leaned against the broken archway, her eyes were vaguely looking onward into the darkening night, and as her hands moved unconsciously over her chain of Egyptian berries, her lips muttered still:

"Thou knowest how I have toiled to keep my oath. Grant me but this-but this! To see her suffer ere I die-suffer as she made thee. Vengeance is righteous!"

A smile more evil than the worst curse that ever lodged on human lips, came upon Strathmore's face where the watery light of the moon fell on it. Having tasted guilt, he had ceased to abhor guilt; racked by remorse, he was still athirst for added crime, and the fires that seethed his soul neither chastened nor purged, but only burned what was iron into steel.

Righteous ?" he said, with a sneer, while his voice was laboured with the passions roused by this woman's tempting, but suppressed by her presence. "No!-it is hellish. But what matter?-it is sweet. Answer me, impostor or devil, whichever you be-why do you hate ?"

A weary smile, haggard as grief, crossed her lips for one moment, and a strange softness trembled over all her face.

Why, why!" she cried. And the melancholy Czeschen words rose plaintively upon the silence. "Why do women ever hate, sorrow, travail, rejoice, lament? Because they love! I loved-I-the vagrant, the gipsy, the fortune-teller, whom delicate women shrink from as from pollution, loved, what she-the aristocrat, the courted darling, the beauty of courts-robbed from me. I loved-oh God! it is not of the past. I love still! my beloved, my beloved!"

Her head drooped upon her breast with a low gasping sob, and her form trembled as though she shivered at the wind; then she threw back her head and stood erect with her stag-like gesture, the light glittering flame-like in her eyes, the dark blood burning flame-like on her brow.

"We met in Galicia. He was an Austrian soldier, a noble like yourself, and he found beauty in me, and I loved him, as the chill, pampered, luxurious women of his world never love. I was his toy, but he-he was my god! What others called my shame, was my glory; what others held my sin, was my crown; and I said in my soul, I have lived enough, since I have lived to be thus dear to him.' I quitted my tribe