touch yours. Curse you, and
your money, and your family! Not for all the gold that was ever coined
would I yield up my power! My day will come, and may the evil spirit
bring you tidings of it down into hell! Curse you, Martin de Vaux! Now
you know my mind."

The dying man was strangely calm. From under the bed-clothes came the
faint sound of the opening and shutting of the despatch-box.

"Yes, I know your mind," he repeated quietly. "You mean me to die with
the torturing thought that I have left a poisonous reptile to suck
the life and blood from those I love, and the honour from a grand old
name. But I will not! We will take our next journey together, Victor."

A sudden change had crept into his tone before the last sentence; and
before it had died away, the priest and the man by the bedside had
leaped to their feet in horror. He whom they had thought too weak to
stir was sitting bolt upright in bed, his eyes blazing and his hand
extended. There was a line of fire, a loud report, and then a single
cry of agony. The man who had leaned over the foot of the bed lay on
the ground just as he had fallen, shot dead through the heart, and a
child, dark-skinned and thin, who had rushed in at the sound of the
report, was sobbing passionately with her arms wound around him.
Across the bed, still grasping the pistol, but with his hands hanging
helplessly down, lay the man who had fired the shot. The effort had
killed him.

The priest was the first in the room to move. He slowly bent over both
bodies, and then turned round to the other man.

"Dead?" he asked, with a dry, choking gasp.

"Both dead."

The priest and his companion, shocked and unnerved, looked at one
another in silence. The child's sobs grew louder, and the morning
sunlight stole across the bare floor, and fell upon the white, still
faces.

The tragedy was over, and the seeds of another sown.

CHAPTER II

"THE NEW ART"

A tall, fair young man stood in the small alcove of Lady Swindon's
drawing-room, with his eyes fixed upon the door. He was accurately
dressed in the afternoon garb of a London man about town, and carried
in his hand, or rather in his hands, for they were crossed behind him,
that hall-mark of Western civilization--a well-brushed, immaculate
silk hat. Neither in his clothes nor personal appearance was there any
striking difference between him and the crowd of other young men who
thronged the rooms, except perhaps that he was a tri