The letter, which had half fallen from its envelope, was of four pages, closely covered with many lines. For an instant her colour deepened and then died out, leaving her cheek pale, her eyes sank beneath his, and her fluent tongue was silent. Strathmore rose to his feet, grasping the letter in his hand, a hideous suspicion coiling round him, and the jealous love in him working up in silence.

"Since you must be in error as regards its meaning, Lady Vavasour, do you now permit me to read this mere dinner refusal ?'""'

"No!"

And as the single word was launched from her lips in haughty denial, with the swift movement peculiar to her she raised herself from her pile of cushions, caught the note in her hand, twisting it by a rapid action from his hold, and held it to a spirit-lamp, that was burning liquid perfume on the table, which stood, with her coffee, at her elbow. The flame caught, it flared alight, and shrivelling in a second, the note fell, a harmless heap of light grey ashes, into the jasper saucer of the lamp, its words destroyed, its secret safe. Then she laughed softly and amusedly at her own success-her mood changing like a child's.

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"Amigo mio," she said, gaily, never oppose a woman-she will always outwit you! While you have but one mode of Menace, we have a thousand resources of Finesse !"

Lady Vavasour was laughing, tranquil, at her ease again, now that the note was floating among the liquid perfume in ashes which could tell no tales. Done in one moment, ere he could arrest her hand or avert the flame, the action literally for that moment confounded Strathmore, and struck him dumb; the next, the abhorred suspicion seemed written in letters of flame before his eyes. His love, though an utter slavery in its bondage, was imperious in its dark and bitter jealousy; the blood rushed over his forehead, and his teeth clenched hard, as he saw the ashes fall into the essence, and heard her low, soft laugh of triumph. "That letter holds a secret so dear that you destroy it! then!

I will wrench it out of the man who shares it!"

So be it,

He moved to leave her presence, but, before he could escape her, she raised herself from her couch, and laid her hand on his arm-the hand that could hold him closely as a chain of iron:

"Cecil, you must be mad! Wait and listen to me."

Every word of her voice he was used to obey as though he had no law save her will; but the very weakness of the love she had triumphed over, made its ferocity when crossed with the looming shadow of the slightest rivalry; now he threw her hand off him.

"Listen!-you have palmed one falsehood off on me already, why wait for another? Your own secrets you must keep as you will, but the man who shares them shall answer to me

"You are mad, Cecil!" cried Marion Vavasour again, her eyes lighting with pretty contemptuous anger, as of a spoiled beauty crossed in her will, while the slender hand closed still on his arm with a movement that, slight as it was, might betray anxiety. "I forbid you to do any such thing! My name disputed over, as over some dancer's, or rosière's! I forbid it-I will not have it!"

"Let me go!" said Strathmore, so rife with passion that he scarce knew or heeded what he said. "Let me go! You have lied to me, and I will know what made the need of a lie. You burnt the letter, lest I

should even see one word; I have a right to know what those words were which must have been faithlessness to me; I cannot grind it from you by force-I will seek it where I can, and, by God! if

The words broke asunder unuttered; he could not put into plain speech the hideous thought which he would have disbelieved, in the teeth of all evidence on earth or heaven, save her own witness against her. His strength went down under the torture of the mere doubt that she could be faithless to him, and the oath died away on his lips, which were blanched as death; his love swept aside all beyond itself; to her he had no pride, and he threw himself beside her, twining in his hands her loosened hair, and scorching her brow with his breath.

“I am mad, if you will! My God! have pity on me. I never stooped to any living thing-I stoop to you! Give a thought to another you shall not-you cannot ! For the love of Heaven, tell me

And she thought with all a woman's glad idolatry of power how utterly this man loved her!

"Do not trifle with me," muttered Strathmore, incoherently twisting round his hands, in his delirious suffering, the golden meshes of her hair, as though with that frail bond to knit her to him through life and death. "Tell me the truth-the truth!- -or I will wrench it from the coward who has robbed me. No man should thieve even a glance of yours, and live

The words were muttered in his throat, fierce in their menace, yet imploring in their pain; his very life-more than his life!-hung on this woman's love. She saw he was no longer to be played with; she saw that every syllable he said would be wrought out; she saw that here ―with his jealous passions loosed-he was no more her slave, but had become her master, and Marion Vavasour shrank from his grasp and from his gaze;—she feared the strength of what she had invoked.

But she was a woman who knew well how to deal with the men she ruled. Her hand gently touched his brow, and she stooped towards him with a pitying, tender smile:

"Ah, Cecil! can you not trust me even in so little? Sceptic! you are unjust and cruel; I but burnt that letter to spare you pain!" "To spare me pain! Quick!-tell me all-all!”

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No," she whispered, bending till her wooing lips kissed his brow; "let it pass. You know I love you-love but you! Let it pass, my

dearest !"

"Never! Tell me-at once-or I seek him this moment !" She stooped lower still, while her fragrant breath was warm on his cheek, and her whisper stole on his ear:

"Then-then (let it stir no words between you, Cecil, for my sake!) -but-your friend was very treacherous to you, and that letter spoke a love which was as hateful to me, as it was craven to you. That is all the truth! Forgive me its concealment; I would so gladly have saved you its pain!"

II.

THE SWOOP OF THE VULTURE.

AN hour afterwards, Strathmore quitted the Bosquet de Diane, and took his way across the grounds. He walked at his usual leisurely pace, he had a cigar in his mouth, and his manner was tranquil as usual. But a dog glancing at him would have shrunk whining and frightened away, and a stranger meeting him, and looking at the deadly glitter in his eyes under their drooped lids, would have thought, " that man is bound on a merciless errand." The hour was just mid-day, the birds had ceased from song, the scythe lay among the unshaven grass, the vintagers afar off had left their work, the very leaves hung stirless. All nature was calm and at rest-all, save the same passions which have drenched the laughing earth in blood, and mocked the sweet, hushed stillness of the summer skies, and made the fair day hideous with their riot, since the suns of Asia shone on the white, upturned face of the First Dead, and the curse was branded on the brow of Cain.

Strathmore crossed the gardens without haste in his steps, his hand closing on a little cane; the blood of his race ran unchanged in his veins, dark with that ruthless wrath which had never yielded to the memory of mercy, the prayers of pity, or the rights of justice, and which had scathed all out of its path, as the scythe sweeps the seeding-grass. To the woman he had quitted he had said but little; but he left her to revenge the coward who would have robbed him, by such chastisement as men do not speak of to women. Less fully told than hinted at, less gathered by deliberate evidence than grasped in all its broad, accursed meaning, the treachery stood out black and bare before him. In his revenge he would have spared no living thing that could have risen up betwixt him and it; had he known of any darker, fuller, fouler, which his birth and breeding could have permitted, or the age and the world allowed, he would have made the man he hated drain it to the last drop. He had left her, soothing her fears, promising her no violence-left her, with the passions in his blood, that in darker ages far back, had trodden out human life pitilessly and recklessly, as so much waste water spilt, and had scored down with unrelenting bitterness the ruthless motto of a ruthless race, Slay! and spare not."

He walked across the grounds alone once he glanced up. The radiant day seemed hot with flame, and the cloudless heavens looked brazen in the light. But he went onward, still calmly, leisurely as before, but with the bloodhound's thirst growing stronger and stronger within him, and set but on one goal. What are our passions, once let loose, but sleuthhounds freed from leash, which run down all before them, and hunt on even to the death?

A breadth of sward alone separated the maisonette of Lady Vavasour from the villa beyond. He opened the gates and passed on, leaving the paradise of roses behind him. Through the glades of trees the terrace which ran before the villa was visible, and a group of men were standing there. Three of them were strangers to him, the fourth was Erroll, who was standing with a brace of setters at his feet, behind him the open

window of the dark oak library he had just quitted, before him all the light of the summer noontide.

Strathmore saw him—and his hand clenched down on the cane he held, that dainty jewelled switch, fragile and costly enough for a lady's ridingwhip. As the sun flickered through the branches on to his face it was calm and impassive, but there was a cruel smile about his mouth, and his grey eyes were black and lustrous, with a fierce, eager light.

The setters as he approached gave tongue, and Erroll turned. He was talking with them of Court beauties, of Blois races, of the baccarat at Lilli Dorah's, of all the trifles and the chit-chat of an ordinary Paris day; for we smoke and gossip and laugh and dine while our lives are making shipwreck, and all we value is drifting away to the greedy, tideless sea of a fathomless past that will never give back its dead. As he looked up his face brightened-he thought Strathmore was come for a tacit reconciliation. Enough had been said twelve hours before to have steeled him to any such feeling; but his nature was not capable of harbouring revenge : he forgave freely-as he would have forgiven now, even such epithets as men never pardon, for the sake of all those thousand memories of childhood, and of manhood, that were still warm about his heart, not even to be washed out, and trampled from remembrance, by the tide of a jealous love, or by the sting of a bitter feud.

He looked up, a smile of pleasure lighting his eyes, which had been heavy and worn before; and Strathmore saw him as he came up the slope terrace the man who had once flung himself in his defence into the near grip of death, who had been with him in shifting scenes of danger, pleasure, revel, or privation, and who had trusted him and shared his trust, as though the same mother had borne them, since they had been children together playing with the fallen chesnuts, or wading in the shallow estuaries under the woods of White Ladies, far away in England. Strathmore saw him, and looked at him with a relentless smile about his lips, and his hand closed tighter on the switch, with which he moved out of his path the curling tendrils of the clematis. The revenge of men of his blood had always been swift and silent, but they had always tasted it, slowly yet thirstily, drop by drop, with the fierce delight of the vulture, as it sweeps and circles above its prey before it swoops down to wrench and

tear.

He went up the terrace-slope leisurely, and lifted his hat with suave courtesy, the soft ceremony in which men of his blood had ever clothed their deadliest approach, the silky velvet glove which they had ever drawn over the merciless iron hand whose grip was death.

Erroll stood leaning against the side of the window; he could not make the first movement towards a tacit reconciliation, but he was ready to meet, to more than meet, one. He only needed Strathmore's hand stretched out to him in silence, to give his own, and mutely forgive the worst words which had been uttered twelve hours before.

"Pardon, messieurs!" said Strathmore, quietly passing the other men, while they parted to let him approach: as the sun fell on it, his face wore a strange look, out of keeping with the easy suavity of his manner. He moved on to the library window, where Erroll stood, with the sunlight full upon his face. Calmly, as though he tendered them a cigar, Strath

more glanced round him at the three other men, with a bitter evil sneer about his lips. "Messieurs! is there any answer save one customary to

a lie ?"

The men-young fellows-surprised and embarrassed, hesitated: Erroll looked up, the angry blood rushing hotly to his face; but he stretched out his hand with an involuntary gesture.

"Strathmore! you are in gross error! Come within here a moment; I must have one more word with you."

"Words are not my answer!"

And as the syllables left his lips, hurled out in blind and deadly fury, he lifted his right arm, the jewelled handle of the cane flashed in the sunlight, the switch swirled through the air like a flail, with a shrill sound, and in the swiftness of a second had struck a broad, livid mark across Erroll's brow, brutal as a death-stroke, ineffaceable as shame.

"That for your treachery to me. I will have your life for your love for her."

The words were hissed in Erroll's ear as the blow fell, low but distinct as the hiss of a snake, chill as steel, relentless as death. As he reeled back, for the moment staggered and blinded, Strathmore's eyes fastened on the swollen crimson bar, where the switch had cut its mark, with the steady, pitiless greed for revenge that, fed to the full, yet clamoured still for more. In the blazing glare of the hot noon the vile, ineffaceable insult seemed stamped on the living flesh in letters of flame, which nothing in past, or present, or future, could ever cover or wash out, for which blood alone could ever atone and Strathmore laughed low to himself a chill and mocking laugh. Breaking the switch in two, he threw the fragments down at the feet of the man he had struck, his eyes glittering exultant, the veins in his face black and swollen in the fury of his wrath, a sneering smile set about his lips, as he turned to the others with a slight bow of careless courtesy:

"Messieurs! you are my witnesses!

-" but Erroll's hand struck

his lips to silence with a force that would have sent a weaklier man hurled backward to the earth. 'By God! you must answer this."

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The oath rattled in his throat, his face was white, save where the red cut stood out across his brow; his voice was hoarse and his breath stifled as the words gasped out; the suddenness of the foul indignity seemed to have paralysed in him all save the sheer instinct of its revenge, and to have numbed and stricken even that.

"With pleasure!" said Strathmore, while he drew on his right-hand glove, slowly and gently.

"Where?"

The single word came from Erroll's throat hoarse and suffocated with passion.

"In the Deer-park of the Bois, by the pond, if it suit you."

"Your hour?"

"At sunset to-night? I am engaged until then."

"I shall await you."

"Soit!"

With those few rapid words all was said; all had been done and spoken in less than sixty seconds, swift as thought and breathless as passion, staggering and bewildering those who looked on like the sudden flash of