elf down in his chair
blanched and nerveless. They who have experienced the minutes when a
well-loved one hangs between life and death can alone know what he
suffered. It was now that the fleeting poverty of the ideals he had been
following became visible. The elegance, the pride, the historic glamour,
the fine breeding of the Old _Regime_, by which he had been fascinated,
had they not fallen to pieces like a flower whose petals are scattered
in the tempest? Even the burning hope of his heart, the dream of a life
of earthly bliss with his love, was showing its insecurity and dropping
asunder. His ship was sinking in the ocean of Eternity. How futile his
intrigue, how mean his deceptions, how insufficient his excuses. The
Everlasting Presence gazed through them, and in its all-illumining blaze
they fell and sank away. He saw that that which underlies life and death
and all that is, is a living Conscience, to which all must perforce
conform. Pride, deception, selfishness, uncontrol of passion, the taking
of that which was not his, and the injuring of honourable men--these
excrescences he saw upon his soul, and that without their surgery it
would never be divine. He remembered the prophetic warning of his
father that "Eternal Justice calls us to exact account"; and the
pertinacity of Retribution in the matter of the Golden Dog. He saw that
the justice of this life and the next are one, and are absolutely
complete in their demands. One great conclusion came to him with
overwhelming force; he saw that it was the plan of Heaven that _no man
must profit by any fruit of his wrong_. He now himself must meet that
justice and make that retribution.

At length, leaving the room, he dragged himself up the stair leading to
his own chamber, a cramped place in the flat above, bearing small
resemblance to his luxurious apartments of former days; yet around it
were hung the de Lincy family portraits; his sword of the Bodyguard lay
on the mantel; and in the space behind the door were the old Chevalier's
iron-bound muniment-chest and his own little portmanteau gilded with his
arms.

With fevered face and icy hands he opened the latter and sought out the
packet of his proofs of _noblesse_. Then turning to the fireplace
beneath the mantel, he threw the papers one by one into it--his
falsified birth-certificate, his father's altered marriage-contract, the
letter of the gentlemen of Montreal, the apology of Councillor de Lery,
the will of th