im
and mark him and know him. The bride herself would come next in a
dazzling cloud of her bridesmaids, all dressed in white. Then as the
two stood together--he and she, hand in hand, glancing softly at each
other, and with all other eyes upon them, he himself would rise
up--_and do it_. Suddenly there would be a wild cry, and she would
turn towards him, and see him, and understand him, and fall fainting
before him. Then while both lay at his feet he would turn to those
about him and say, very calmly, "Take me. It was I." All being done,
he would not shrink, and when his time came he would meet his fate
without flinching, and in the awful hereafter he would stand before
the white throne and say, "It would have been an evil thing if God's
ways had not been justified before men: so I have executed on earth
His judgment who has said in His Holy Writ that the wrongdoer shall
surely suffer vengeance, even to the third and fourth generation of
his children."

Thinking so, in the mad tangle of his poor, disordered brain, yet
with a great awe upon him as of one laden with a mission from on
high, Jason went back to his lodging, threw himself down, without
undressing, upon the bed, and fell into a heavy sleep.

When he awoke next morning the bells in the turret overhead were
jangling in his ears, and his deaf old landlady was leaning over him
and calling to him.

"Get up, love, get up: it's late, love; you'll miss it all, love;
it's time to go in, love," she was saying; and a little later she led
him by a side door into the Cathedral.

He took a seat where he had decided to take it, in a corner of the
pew before the altar-rail, and all seemed the same as he had
pictured. The throngs of people were behind him, and he could hear
their whispering and light laughter while they waited. There was the
door at which the venerable Bishop would soon enter, carrying his big
book, and there was the path, kept free and strewn with flowers, down
which the bride and her train would pass on to the red form before
him. Ah! the flowers--blood red and purple--how sweetly they trailed
over altar-rail, and pulpit, and the tablet of the ten commandments!
Following them with his eyes, while with his hands he fumbled his
belt for _that_ which he had concluded to carry there, suddenly he
was smitten with an awful dread. One line of the printed words before
him seemed to come floating through the air down to his face in a
vapor of the same blood-red