hat she was coaxing him, caressing him, and kissing him
back to life.

"Michael," she whispered, "Michael! My poor Michael!" she murmured,
while she moistened his lips and parched tongue with the brenni-vin
from the horn of some good man standing near.

Jason saw this and heard this, though he had eyes and ears for
nothing besides. And thinking, in the wild tumult of his distempered
brain, that such tenderness might have been his, should have been
his, must have been his, but for this man who had robbed him of this
woman, all the bitterness of his poisoned heart rose up to choke him.

He remembered his weary life with this man, his sufferings with him,
his love for him, and he hated himself for it all. What devil of hell
had made sport of him, to give him his enemy for his friend? How
Satan himself must shriek aloud to see it, that he who had been
thrice robbed by this man--robbed of a father, robbed of a mother,
robbed of a wife--should in his blindness tend him, and nurse him,
and carry him with sweat of blood over trackless wastes that he might
save him alive for her who waited to claim him!

Then he remembered what he had come for, and that all was not yet
done. Should he do it after all? Should he give this man back to this
woman? Should he renounce his love and his hate together--his love of
this woman, his hate of this man? Love? Hate? Which was love? Which
was hate? Ah, God! They were one; they were the same. Heaven pity
him, what was he to do?

Thus the powers of good and the powers of evil wrestled together in
Jason's heart for mastery. But the moment of their struggle was
short. One look at the piteous blind face lying on Greeba's bosom,
one glance at the more piteous wet face that hung over it, and love
had conquered hate in that big heart forever and forever.

Jason was recalled to himself by a dull hum of words that seemed to
be spoken from the Mount. Someone was asking why he had come there,
and brought Michael Sunlocks along with him. So he lifted his hand,
partly to call attention, partly to steady himself, and in a broken
voice he said these words:--

"Men and women, if you could only know what it means that you have
just witnessed, I think it would be enough to move any man. You know
what I am--a sort of bastard who has never been a man among men, but
has walked alone all the days of his life. My father killed my
mother, and so I vowed to kill my father. I did not do it, for I
saved him out o