supplication, a royal anger, then the love of a young girl imploring mercy
of her executioners. Finally, the awful look that a man casts upon his
fellow-men on his way to the scaffold. So much life shone in this fragment
of life that Don Juan recoiled in terror. He walked up and down the room,
not daring to look at the eye, which stared back at him from the ceiling
and from the hangings. The room was sown with points full of fire, of
life, of intelligence. Everywhere gleamed eyes which shrieked at him.

"He might have lived a hundred years longer!" he cried involuntarily when,
led in front of his father by some diabolical influence, he contemplated
the luminous spark.

Suddenly the intelligent eye closed, and then opened again abruptly, as if
assenting. If a voice had cried, "Yes," Don Juan could not have been more
startled.

"What is to be done?" he thought

He had the courage to try to close this white eyelid, but his efforts were
in vain.

"Shall I crush it out? Perhaps that would be parricide?" he asked himself.

"Yes," said the eye, by means of an ironical wink.

"Ah!" cried Don Juan, "there is sorcery in it!"

He approached the eye to crush it. A large tear rolled down the hollow
cheek of the corpse and fell on Belvidero's hand.

"It is scalding!" he cried, sitting down.

This struggle had exhausted him, as if, like Jacob, he had battled with an
angel.

At last he arose, saying: "So long as there is no blood--"

Then, collecting all the courage needed for the cowardly act, he crushed
out the eye, pressing it in with the linen without looking at it. A deep
moan, startling and terrible, was heard. It was the poor spaniel, who died
with a howl.

"Could he have been in the secret?" Don Juan wondered, surveying the
faithful animal.

Don Juan was considered a dutiful son. He raised a monument of white
marble over his father's tomb, and employed the most prominent artists of
the time to carve the figures. He was not altogether at ease until the
statue of his father, kneeling before Religion, imposed its enormous
weight on the grave, in which he had buried the only regret that had ever
touched his heart, and that only in moments of physical depression.

On making an inventory of the immense wealth amassed by the old
Orientalist, Don Juan became avaricious. Had he not two human lives in
which he should need money? His deep, searching gaze penetrated the
principles of social life, and he understood the w