y wilfully
rejecting the free offers of His mercy."

"Mercy!--Life!" Here he laughed outright. "Hearest thou not my
tormentor?--Life!--I am dead, wench; and my grave is waiting for me,
dug by these accursed fingers. That grave I digged for thee is now
mine. Unwittingly have I bought it, and the coin is in thy purse!"

It seems the poor maniac, in replacing the mysterious coin to which,
from some cause or other, he attached such importance, had
unthinkingly added it to the common hoard, and in this manner conveyed
it to the stranger, whose grave he persisted he had bought by this
transfer; and nothing could shake his belief in so marvellous a
conclusion.

The cavalier attempted to comfort him; and in order to make the
delusion subservient to the removal of its terrors, he offered to
restore the coin, or even the whole of what he had received, that the
simple gravedigger might be certain he had it in possession.

"'Tis needless; the token, once from my grasp and in the fingers of
another whose grave I have digged, would never change my doom by its
return. Keep what thou hast; and may it serve thee more faithfully
than it hath served me! But remember--let me say it while my senses
hold together, for I feel the blast coming that shall scatter them to
the four winds--remember, if thou part therefrom, as I have done, to
some doomed one, thou shalt go to the grave in his stead. But a
charmed life is thine as long as it is in thy possession. Away--leave
me--the master will be here presently for his own. Leave me, I say;
for when the fiend cometh, he'll not tarry. But be sure you make fast
the door, lest I escape, and mischief happen, should I get abroad."

"Stephen!" said Marian, "slight not the mercy of thy God, nor
dishonour His name, by hearkening to the suggestions of the enemy. His
arm is not shortened, nor His ear heavy."

"I know it; but when the fiend came, and found the house swept and
garnished, did he not take unto himself seven other spirits more
wicked than himself, and was not the latter end of that man worse than
the first?"

"Yet," said Marian, "would he have been delivered if he had cried out
to the strong man armed."

"But he would hear no refutation, persisting in the thought that his
crime was unpardonable, since he had relapsed after the devil was cast
out." During the present paroxysm, it was in vain to thwart him
further; indeed their stay was attended with some hazard, of which, it
seems, he f