well? I pray you tell me."

Was it a laugh he heard in answer? Rather a sound, not of human mirth
but as of a condemned spirit laughing deep underground. Then again the
low even voice replied out of the expressionless face.

"Aye, your master is well."

"Ah, thank God," burst forth Sholto, "he is alive."

The Lady Sybilla moved her hand this way and that with the gesture of
a blind man groping.

"Hush," she said, "I only said that he was well. And he is well. As I
am already in the place of torment, I know that there is a heaven for
those who die as William Douglas died."

Sholto's cry rang sudden, loud, despairing.

"Dead--dead--Earl William dead--my master dead!"

He dropped the palfrey's rein, which till now he had held. His sword
fell unheeded on the turf, and he flung himself down in an agony of
boyish grief. But from her white palfrey, sitting still where she was,
the maiden watched the paroxysms of his sorrow. She was dry eyed now,
and her face was like a mask cut in snow.

Then as suddenly recalling himself, Sholto leaped from the ground,
snatched up his sword, and again passionately advanced upon the Lady
Sybilla.

"You it was who betrayed him," he cried, pointing the blade at her
breast; "answer if it were not so!"

"It is true I betrayed him," she answered calmly.

"You whom he loved--God knows how unworthily--"

"God knows," she said simply and calmly.

"You betrayed him to his death. Why then should not I kill you?"

Again she smiled upon him that disarming, hopeless, dreadful smile.

"Because you cannot kill me. Because it were too crowning a mercy to
kill me. Because, for three inches of that blade in my heart, I would
bless you through the eternities. Because I must do the work that
remains--"

"And that work is--?"

"Vengeance!!"

Sholto was silent, trying to piece things together. He found it hard
to think. He was but a boy, and experience so strange as that of the
Lady Sybilla was outside him. Yet vaguely he felt that her emotion was
real, more real perhaps than his own instinct of crude slaying--the
desire of the wasp whose nest has been harried to sting the first
comer. This woman's hatred was something deadlier, surer, more
persistent.

"Vengeance--" he said at last, scarce knowing what he said, "why
should you, who betrayed him, speak of avenging him?"

"Because," said the Lady Sybilla, "I loved him as I never thought to
love man born of woman. Because when the fiends