ng. The truth had fallen upon him at a blow, and
under his strong emotions his faculties seemed to be slain in a
moment. He felt blind, and deaf, and unable to think. Presently,
without knowing where he was going, but impelled by some blind force,
and staggering along like a drunken man, he found himself approaching
the Bishop's Palace.

"He is there," he thought: "the man who has stood in my place all his
days: the man who has stripped me of every good thing in life. He is
there, in honor, and wealth, and happiness; and I am here, a homeless
outcast in the night. Oh, that I could do it now--now--now!"

But at that he remembered that he had never yet seen Michael
Sunlocks, to know him from another man. "I must wait," he thought. "I
must go to work cautiously. I must see him first, and watch him."

The night was then far spent towards midnight; the streets had grown
quiet, the lights of the town no longer sent a yellow glare over the
grass-clad housetops, and from a quiet sky the moon and stars shone
out.

Jason was turning back towards his lodgings when he heard a voice
that made him stand. It was a woman's voice singing, and it came with
the undertones of some string instrument from the house in front of
him. After a moment he pushed the gate open and walked across the
little grass plat until he came beneath the only window from which a
light still shone. There he stopped and listened, laying his hand on
the sill to steady himself.

Ah! now he knew the voice too well. It was Greeba's. She was there;
she was on the other side of that wall at that instant. And she was
singing. It was a love-song that she sang. Her very heart seemed to
speak in it, for her tones were the tones of love, and _he_ must be
beside her.

"It is for him she has left me," thought Jason, in the whirl of his
dazed brain; "for him and his place, his station, and the pride of
his success."

Then, remembering how his love of this woman had fooled him through
five treacherous years, turning him aside from thoughts of his vow,
giving him his father's money for his mother's wrongs, and how she
who had been so damned dear to him had drawn him on in the days of
her trouble, and cast him off when another beckoned to her, he cried
in his tortured heart, "Oh, God in heaven, give me this man into my
hands."

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SWORD OF ESAU.

Jason went back to his lodging by the Cathedral, found the old
caretaker sitting up for him, mad