and grew impatient at my
silence.

"Say now, my friend!" he queried, with a sort of childish eagerness,
"did I not take a good vengeance? God himself could not have done
better!"

"I think your wife deserved her fate," I said, curtly, "but I cannot
say I admire you for being her murderer."

He turned upon me rapidly, throwing both hands above his head with a
frantic gesticulation. His voice rose to a kind of muffled shriek.

"Murderer you call me--ha! ha! that is good. No, no! She murdered me! I
tell you I died when I saw her asleep in her lover's arms--she killed
me at one blow. A devil rose up in my body and took swift revenge; that
devil is in me now, a brave devil, a strong devil! That is why I do not
fear the plague; the devil in me frightens away death. Some day it will
leave me"--here his smothered yell sunk gradually to a feeble, weary
tone; "yes, it will leave me and I shall find a dark place where I can
sleep; I do not sleep much now." He eyed me half wistfully.

"You see," he explained, almost gently, "my memory is very good, and
when one thinks of many things one cannot sleep. It is many years ago,
but every night I see HER; she comes to me wringing her little white
hands, her blue eyes stare, I hear short moans of terror. Every night,
every night!" He paused, and passed his hands in a bewildered way
across his forehead. Then, like a man suddenly waking from sleep, he
stared as though he saw me now for the first time, and broke into a low
chuckling laugh.

"What a thing, what a thing it is, the memory!" he muttered.
"Strange--strange! See, I remembered all that, and forgot you! But I
know what you want--a suit of clothes--yes, you need them badly, and I
also need the money for them. Ha, ha! And you will not have the fine
coat of Milord Inglese! No, no! I understand. I will find you
something--patience, patience!"

And he began to grope among a number of things that were thrown in a
confused heap at the back of the shop. While in this attitude he looked
so gaunt and grim that he reminded me of an aged vulture stooping over
carrion, and yet there was something pitiable about him too. In a way I
was sorry for him; a poor half-witted wretch, whose life had been full
of such gall and wormwood. What a different fate was his to mine, I
thought. _I_ had endured but one short night of agony; how trifling it
seemed compared to HIS hourly remorse and suffering! He hated Nina for
an act of thoughtlessness; well