And for many a day and hour they had stood between the seeing of his eye and the displaced shape of wholesome human life, so that looking on them now, he saw them only. Not himself, not Felix, the brother of his flesh and blood, but phantoms, ghosts -Sethos the realmless prince, immovable, before Amasis the usurper, sinking to his sudden end. Cold as the spectre of his own thought, erect, unmoved, immovable, with folded arms he stood and looked— Looked on his drowning brother.

Then into the eyes and over the face of Felix there came an undefinable terror.

It was not the terror of death. It was not the vague alarm of a drowning man.

He had understood the face of his brother Edmond. He had read in that face the meaning of a thought which sufficed in a second of time to congeal with horror the essence of his soul.

And Felix shuddered.

So the angels must shudder when they gaze into the depths of Hell.

With a voice that was the death-shriek of man's faith in man, he cried, "Edmond! Edmond!"

It was the sad receding message from a world of love submerged.

Side by side, the fleeting river bore them on, those brothers.

The one safe, unmoved, erect.

The other convulsively struggling with baffled and broken efforts amid the thousand curling, cold, and silvery meshes of that liquid loom of death.

Side by side, the river bore them onward yet. Side

by side, eye fixed on eye, with speechless lips and speaking looks.

A dreadful inutterable dialogue was passing then between the eyes of those two brothers. They understood each other.

And the place, too, was so wickedly silent all this while so horribly aware. Had it sent but a single human sound from the careless innocent life it was keeping out of sight-nay, not so much! had it bid but a wild bird hoot to stop the deadly duel of those dreadful eyes! But no, it held its peace.

At length, as in an agony of supplication, these last words broke from the lips of the sinking swimmer:

"In the name of the All-merciful God, save thine immortal soul! Brother, brother, stretch forth thy hand!"

An arm's length from the boat he sank exhausted. Sinking, his long brown wavy hair spread out-a hideous dusky thing-faint seen an inch beneath the glassy surface. Like a tuft of heaving water-weeds, it rose and fell with the rising and the falling of the rippled waters.

The stretched right arm and imploring hand still rose above the surface.

Involuntarily Edmond leaned forward to seize and grasp it. He had but to stretch forth his hand, and his brother might yet be snatched from destruction.

A heedless sunbeam grazed the glittering jewel upon the right hand of the drowning man, and flashed a violet light into the eyes of Edmond. A voice within his heart called to him,

"Touch not with earthly finger the work of Fate."

He shrank back.

The hand of Felix had disappeared.

.

Again it rose,

And disappeared again.

Once more, and never more again, it reappeared above the water; not as before-not supplicating now, but rigid, and stiffened by the agony of death; held up to heaven high and stark, and as in menace, not in prayer, for the death-cramp had clasped the fingers and locked the fist. A formidable sight.

It sank and rose no more.

How long sat Edmond with fixed eyes, stupidly staring at the glassy murtherous water, that sleek accomplice of his soul's bad angel?

The distant barking of a dog beyond the banks aroused him.

He started, horror-struck, as from a dreadful dream. He looked around in coldest agony of remorse and terror. He was alone. His dream grinned at him with the leaden eyes of reality.

With a shrill wail he sprang up, and plunged headforemost into the stream.

CHAPTER XII.

LEX TALIONIS.

AND Juliet never pardoned Edmond.

Love, perhaps, may survive Esteem, for the cause of love is in itself. It is, and knows not why. But Juliet had not loved Edmond; she had worshiped him. He had committed sacrilege against himself. The God we have knelt to can never kneel to us with impunity. The weakest woman is pitiless to weakness in a man, and the gentlest of a gentle sex has no mitigation of scorn for the man that has betrayed the gentlest quality of her nature-implicit trust.

There is no pardon for desecrated ideals.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE LAST TRIBUNAL.

I HAD ceased reading. I had ended the perusal of the count's papers. The night was far spent. The hours passed unnoticed. The pages still lay in my hand. The knowledge of their story still weighed heavy on my mind.

Horror and compassion contended within me, disputing in my thoughts the sentence of a human soul, as though it were the Judgment Hour.

"No!" I cried at last.

"No pity for the pitiless! No mercy for the unmerciful!"

When the assassin turns the knife in the breast of his victim in the moment when spume is on the lips, and blood is in the eyes of the dying man, he acts perhaps with pity, willing to bring to speedier end those lingering pangs.

The man who first devised the diabolical machinery of torture, and took fierce pleasure gloating on the shrieks of some tormented wretch, sought thus perhaps to slake the thirst of a burning vengeance, or else he was a savage, born with the natural wildness. of an untamed brute, and used to bloody business. But this man?

By so much the more nobly natured, the more deeply damned; for in him, all large and lofty powers,