them unmoved. An exultant light
shone and glittered in his eyes; he had avenged himself and her! Life
was the sole price that his revenge had set; his purpose had been as
iron, and his soul was as bronze. He went nearer, leisurely, and stooped
and looked at the work of his hand. In the gloom the dark-red blood
could yet be clearly seen, slowly welling out and staining the clotted
herbage as it flowed, while one stray gleam of light still stole
across, as if in love and pity, and played about the long fair hair
which trailed amidst the grass.

Life still lingered, faintly, flickeringly, as though both to leave for
ever that which one brief moment before had been instinct with all its
richest glory; the eyes opened wide once more, and looked up to the
evening skies with a wild, delirious, appealing pain, and the lips which
were growing white and drawn moved in a gasping prayer:

"Oh, God! I forgive--I forgive. He did not know"----

Then his head fell back, and his eyes gazed upward without sight or
sense, and murmuring low a woman's name, "Lucille! Lucille!" while one
last breath shivered like a deep-drawn sigh through all his frame--he
died. And his murderer stood by to see the shudder convulse the rigid
limbs, and count each lingering pang--calm, pitiless, unmoved, his face
so serene in its chill indifference, its brutal and unnatural
tranquillity, whilst beneath the drooped lids his eyes watched with the
dark glitter of a triumphant vengeance the last agony of the man whom he
had loved, that the two who were with him in this ghastly hour shrank
involuntarily from his side, awed more by the Living than the Dead.
Almost unconsciously they watched him, fascinated basilisk-wise, as he
stooped and severed a long flake of hair that was soiled by the dank
earth and wet with the dew: unarrested they let him turn away with the
golden lock in his hand and the fatal calm on his face, and move to the
spot where his horse was waiting. The beat of the hoofs rang muffled on
the turf, growing fainter and fainter as the gallop receded. Strathmore
rode to her whose bidding had steeled his arm, and whose soft embrace
would be his reward; rode swift and hard, with his hand closing fast on
the promised pledge of his vengeance; while behind him, in the shadows
of the falling night, lay a man whom he had once loved, whom he had now
slain, with the light of early stars breaking pale and cold, to shine
upon the oozing blood as it trailed sl