s of those you love; but I the deadlier,--the
death of one I hate! Hearken!"

She paused as if to gather strength for that which she had to reveal,
and then, reaching her hands out, she motioned the three men to gather
more closely about her, as if the blue Atlantic waves or the red boles
of the pine trees might carry the matter.

"Listen," she said, "the end comes fast--faster than any know, save I,
to whom for my sins the gift of second sight hath been given. I who
speak to you am of Brittany and of the House of De Thouars. To one of
us in each generation descends this abhorred gift of second sight. And
I, because as a child it was my lot to meet one wholly given over to
evil, have seen more and clearer than all that have gone before me.
But now I do foresee the end of the wickedest and most devilish soul
ever prisoned within the body of man."

As she spoke the heads of the three Scots bent lower and closer to
catch every word, for the voice of the Lady Sybilla was more like the
cooing of a mating turtle as it answers its comrade than that of a
woman betrayed, denouncing vengeance and death upon him whom her soul
hated.

"Be of good heart, then, and depart as I shall bid you. None can help
or hinder here at Machecoul but I alone. Be sure that at the worst the
unnameable shall not happen to the maids. For in me there is the power
to slay the evil-doer. But slay I will not unless it be to keep the
lives of the maids. Because I desire for Gilles de Retz a fate
greater, more terrible, more befitting iniquity such as the world hath
never heard spoken of since it arose from the abyss.

"And this is it given to me to bring upon him whom my soul hateth,"
she went on. "I have seen the hempen cord by which he shall hang. I
have seen the fire through which his soul shall pass to its own place.
Through me this fate shall come upon him suddenly in one night."

Her face lighted up with an inner glow, and shone translucent in the
darkening of the day and the dusk of the trees, as if the fair veil of
flesh wavered and changed about the vengeful soul within.

"And now," she went on after a pause, "I bid you, gentlemen of the
house of Douglas, to depart to John, Duke of Brittany, and having
found him to lay this paper before him. It contains the number and the
names of those who have died in the castles of de Retz. It shows in
what hidden places the bones of these slaughtered innocents may be
found. Clamour in his ear for justi