take that answer and be gone. From my lips you can never have
any other."

A fierce gleam was in his eye, but his voice was still smooth and bland.

"Sweet lady," he said, "it irks me sore to give you pain; but I have yet
another message for you. Think you that I should have dared to come with
this offer of my heart and hand if I had not known that he to whom thy
heart is pledged lies stiff and cold in the grip of death -- nay, has
long since mouldered to ashes in the grave?"

Joan turned deadly pale. She had not known that her secret had passed
beyond her own possession. How came Peter Sanghurst to speak of her as
having a lover? Was it all guesswork? True, he had been jealous of
Raymond in old days. Was this all part of a preconcerted and diabolical
plot against her happiness?

Her profound distrust of this man, and her conviction of his entire
unscrupulousness, helped to steady her nerves. If she had so wily a foe
to deal with, she had need of all her own native shrewdness and
capacity. After a few moments, which seemed hours to her from the
concentrated thought pressed into them, she spoke quietly and calmly:

"Of whom speak you, Sir? Who is it that lies dead and cold?"

"Your lover, Raymond de Brocas," answered Sanghurst, rising to his feet
and confronting Joan with a gaze of would-be sympathy, though his eyes
were steely bright and full of secret malice -- "your lover, who died in
my arms after the skirmish of which you may have heard, when the English
army routed the besieging force around St. Jean d'Angely; and in dying
he gave me a charge for you, sweet lady, which I have been longing ever
since to deliver, but until today have lacked the opportunity."

Joan's eyes were fixed upon him wide with distrust. She was in absolute
ignorance of Raymond's recent movements. But in those days that was the
fate of those who did not live in close contiguity. She had been a rover
in the world, and so perchance had he. All that Sanghurst said might be
true for aught she could allege to the contrary.

Yet how came it that Raymond should confide his dying message to his
sworn and most deadly foe? The story seemed to bear upon it the impress
of falsehood. Sanghurst, studying her face intently, appeared to read
her thoughts.

"Lady," he said, "if you will but listen to my tale, methinks I can
convince you of the truth of my words. You think that because we were
rivals for your hand we were enemies, too? And so of old it