he blow. And Lord Constantine--" The impetuous
flow of the old woman's story was frozen to sudden silence.

"Well, and Lord Constantine?" said I, in low, stern tones, that
quivered with excitement; and I felt Denny's hand, that was on my arm,
jump up and down. "And Constantine, woman?"

"Nay, he did nothing," said she. "He talked with Vlacho a while, and
then they went away, and he bade me tend my lord, and went himself
to seek the Lady Euphrosyne. And presently he came back with her. Her
eyes were red, and she wept afresh when she saw my poor lord, for she
loved him. And she sat by him till Constantine came and told her that
you would not go, and that you and your friends would be killed if
you did not go. And then, weeping to leave my lord, she went, praying
heaven she might find him alive when she returned. 'I must go,' she
said to me; 'for though it is a shameful thing that the island should
have been sold, yet these men must be persuaded to go away and not
meet death. Kiss him for me if he awakes.' Thus she went, and left
me with my lord, and I fear he will die." And she ended in a burst of
sobbing.

For a moment there was silence. Then I said again:

"Who struck the blow, woman? Who struck the blow?"

She shrank from me as though I had struck her. "I do not know, I do
not know," she moaned.

Then a thing happened that seemed strange and awful in the gloomy,
dark hall. For the stricken man opened his eyes, his lips moved, and
he groaned: "Constantine! You, Constantine!" and the old woman's eyes
met mine for a moment, and fell to the ground again.

"Why--why, Constantine?" moaned the wounded man. "I had yielded--I had
yielded, Constantine. I would have sent them--" His words ceased, his
eyes closed, his lips met again, but met only to part. A moment later
his jaw dropped. The old lord of Neopalia was dead.

Then I, carried away by anger and by hatred of the man who, for a
reason I did not yet understand, had struck so foul a blow against his
kinsman and an old man, did a thing so rash that it seems to me now,
when I consider it in the cold light of the past, a mad deed. Yet then
I could do nothing else; and Denny's face, aye, and the eyes of the
others, too, told me that they were with me.

"Compose this old man's body," I said, "and we will watch it. And do
you go and tell this Constantine Stefanopoulos that I know his crime,
that I know who struck that blow, and that what I know all men shall
know, and