ntarily. Some diabolical influence had drawn him to his father,
and again he gazed at that luminous spark. The eyelid closed and
opened again abruptly; it was like a woman's sign of assent. It was an
intelligent movement. If a voice had cried "Yes!" Don Juan could not
have been more startled.

"What is to be done?" he thought.

He nerved himself to try to close the white eyelid. In vain.

"Kill it? That would perhaps be parricide," he debated with himself.

"Yes," the eye said, with a strange sardonic quiver of the lid.

"Aha!" said Don Juan to himself, "here is witchcraft at work!" And he
went closer to crush the thing. A great tear trickled over the hollow
cheeks, and fell on Don Juan's hand.

"It is scalding!" he cried. He sat down. The struggle exhausted him; it
was as if, like Jacob of old, he was wrestling with an angel.

At last he rose. "So long as there is no blood----" he muttered.

Then, summoning all the courage needed for a coward's crime, he
extinguished the eye, pressing it with the linen cloth, turning his head
away. A terrible groan startled him. It was the poor poodle, who died
with a long-drawn howl.

"Could the brute have been in the secret?" thought Don Juan, looking
down at the faithful creature.

Don Juan Belvidero was looked upon as a dutiful son. He reared a
white marble monument on his father's tomb, and employed the greatest
sculptors of the time upon it. He did not recover perfect ease of mind
till the day when his father knelt in marble before Religion, and the
heavy weight of the stone had sealed the mouth of the grave in which he
had laid the one feeling of remorse that sometimes flitted through his
soul in moments of physical weariness.

He had drawn up a list of the wealth heaped up by the old merchant in
the East, and he became a miser: had he not to provide for a second
lifetime? His views of life were the more profound and penetrating;
he grasped its significance, as a whole, the better, because he saw it
across a grave. All men, all things, he analyzed once and for all; he
summed up the Past, represented by its records; the Present in the law,
its crystallized form; the Future, revealed by religion. He took spirit
and matter, and flung them into his crucible, and found--Nothing.
Thenceforward he became DON JUAN.

At the outset of his life, in the prime of youth and the beauty of
youth, he knew the illusions of life for what they were; he despised
the world, and made the