night murder?" demanded Stanley, as he sternly confronted his
baffled foe. "Don Luis Garcia, as men have termed thee, what claim
have I on thy pursuing and unchanging hate? With what dost thou charge
me? What wrong?"

"Wrong!" hoarsely and fiercely repeated Don Louis. "The wrong of
baffled hate; of success, when I planned thy downfall; of escape,
when I had sworn thy death! Did the drivelling idiots, who haunted,
persecuted, excommunicated me from these realms, as some loathed
reptile, dream that I would draw back from my sworn vengeance for such
as they? Poor, miserable fools, whom the first scent of danger would
turn aside from the pursuit of hate! I staked my life on thine, and
the stake is lost; but what care I? My hate shall follow thee; wither
thy bones with its curse; poison every joy; blight every hope; rankle
in thy life blood! Bid thee seek health, and bite the dust for anguish
because it flies thee! And for me. Ha, ha! Men may think to judge
me--torture, triumph, slay! Well, let them." And with a movement so
sudden and so desperate, that to avert it was impossible, he burst
from the grasp of his guards; and with one spring, stood firm and
triumphant on the farthest edge of the battlement. "Now follow me who
dares!" he exclaimed; and, with a fearful mocking laugh; flung himself
headlong down, ere the soldiers had recovered his first sudden
movement. Stanley alone retained presence of mind sufficient to dart
forward, regardless of his own imminent danger, in the vain hope of
arresting the leap; but quick as were his movements, he only reached
the brink in time to see the wretched man, one moment quivering in
air, and lost the next in a dark abyss of shade.

A cry of mingled disappointment, horror, and execration, burst from
all around; and several of the soldiers hastened from the battlements
to the base of the rock, determined on fighting the arch-fiend
himself, if, as many of them firmly believed, he had rendered Don Luis
invulnerable to air, and would wait there to receive him. But even
this heroic resolution was disappointed: the height was so tremendous,
and the velocity of the fall so frightful, that the action of the air
had not only deprived him of life, but actually loosed the limbs from
the trunk, and a fearfully mangled corpse was all that remained to
glut the vengeance of the infuriated soldiers.

The confusion and excitement attending this important event, spread
like wildfire; not only over Alb