y did he not let them kill him first? He had signed, and
explain as he would, he could never look an honest man in the face
again, and less still a woman, if she knew the truth. So he was not
still alive because he was innocent, since for all the good that
this very doubtful innocence of his was likely to be even to his own
conscience, he might almost as well have been guilty. Nor was he alive
because he feared to die. He did fear to die horribly, but to the young
and impressionable, at any rate, there are situations in which death
seems the lesser of two evils. That situation had been well-nigh reached
by him last night when he set the hilt of his sword against the floor
and shrank back at the prick of its point. To-day it was overpast.

No, he lived on because before he died he had a hate to satisfy, a
revenge to work. He would kill this dog, Ramiro, who had tricked him
with his crystal gazing and his talk of friendship, who had frightened
him with the threat of death until he became like some poor girl and for
fear signed away his honour--oh, Heaven! for very fear, he who prided
himself upon his noble Spanish blood, the blood of warriors--this
treacherous dog, who, having used him, had not hesitated to betray his
shame to her from whom most of all it should have been hidden, and,
for aught he knew, to the others also. Yes if ever he met him--his
own brother--Foy would spit upon him in the street; Foy, who was
so hatefully open and honest, who could not understand into what
degradation a man's nerves may drag him. And Martin, who had always
mistrusted and despised him, why, if he found the chance, he would tear
him limb from limb as a kite tears a partridge. And, worse still, Dirk
van Goorl, the man who had befriended him, who had bred him up although
he was no son of his, but the child of some rival, he would sit there
in his prison cell, and while his face fell in and his bones grew daily
plainer, till at length his portly presence was as that of a living
skeleton, he would sit there by the window, watching the dishes of
savoury food pass in and out beneath him, and between the pangs of his
long-drawn, hideous agony, put up his prayer to God to pay back to him,
Adrian, all the woe that he had caused.

Oh! it was too much. Under the crushing weight of his suffering, his
senses left him, and he found such peace as to-day is won by those who
are about to pass beneath the surgeon's knife; the peace that but too
often w