of the low, bitter wail that went up to heaven like the cry from Gehenna
of some fair, lost spirit, "My shame--my shame!"

Under favor of the audience, we will drop the curtain here. One of our
puppets shall appear to-night no more. When a heroine is once on the
stage, the public has a right to be indulged with the spectacle of her
faults and follies, as well as of her virtues and excellences; yet I
love the phantasm of my queenly Cecil too well to parade her discrowned
and in abasement.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Other eyes besides Cecil's kept watch through the night that followed
that eventful day. Royston's never closed till the dawning. Sometimes
sitting motionless, sunk in his gloomy meditations, sometimes walking
restlessly to and fro, and cooling his hot forehead in the current of
the fresh night air, he kept his mind on a perpetual strain, calculating
all probable and improbable chances; and the dull red light was never
quenched, that told of perpetually-renewed cigars.

I fancy I hear an objection, springing from lips that are wont to be
irresistible, leveled against such an atrocious want of sentiment.
Fairest critic! we will not now discuss the merits or demerits of
nicotine, considered as an aid to contemplation, or an anodyne; but do
you allow enough for the force of habit? Putting aside the case of those
Indian captives, who are allowed a pipe in the intervals of torment (for
these poor creatures have had no advantages of education, and are beyond
the pale of civilized examples), do you not know that men have finished
their last weed while submitting to the toilette of the guillotine? We
are told that a Spaniard has begged of his confessor a light for his
_papelito_ within sight of a freshly dug grave, when the firing-party
was awaiting him one hundred paces off with grounded arms.

Only when the sky was gray did Royston lie down to rest; but he slept
heavily late into the morning. His first act, when he rose, was to send
a note to Cecil Tresilyan, begging her to meet him at a named place and
time: she did not answer it, nevertheless he felt certain she would
come. Assignations were no novelties to him, but he had gone forth to
bear his part in more than one stricken field, where the chances of life
and death were evenly poised, without any such despondency or
uncertainty as clung to him then on his way to the appointed spot. He
arrived there first, but he had not waited long when Cecil came slowly
a