ng his face toward Kingsland Court. "You, my Lord of
Kingsland, have sown the wind. You shall learn what it is to reap the
whirlwind!"

"Pietro! Pietro!" crowed a little voice, gleefully. "Papa Pietro!
take Sunbeam!"

The little sleeper in the bed had sat up, her bright, dark face
sparkling, two little dimpled arms outstretched.

The man turned, his vindictive face growing radiant.

"Papa Pietro's darling! his life! his angel! And how does the little
Sunbeam?"

He caught her up, covering her face with kisses.

"My love! my life! my darling! When Pietro is dead, and Zara is old
and feeble, and Zenith dust and ashes, you will live, my radiant angel,
my black-eyed beauty, to perpetuate the malediction. When his son is a
man, you will be a woman, with all a woman's subtle power and more than
a woman's beauty, and you will be his curse, and his bane, and his
blight, as his father has been ours! Will you not, my little Sunbeam?"

"Yes, papa--yes, papa!" lisped the little one.

"Pietro!" called his wife, "if you have done breakfast, come up.
Mother is awake and would see you."

"Coming, _carissima_!"

He kissed the baby girl, placed her on the pallet, and sprung lightly
up the steep stair.

The loft was just a shade less wretched than the apartment below.
There was a bed on the floor, more decently covered, two broken chairs,
a table with some medicine bottles and cups, and a white curtain on the
one poor window.

On the bed lay a woman, over whom Pietro bent reverently the moment he
entered the room. It was the wreck of a woman who, in the days gone
by, must have been gloriously beautiful; who was beautiful still,
despite the ravages years, sickness, and poverty had wrought.

The eyes that blazed brilliant and black were the eyes of Zara--the
eyes of the baby Sunbeam below--and this woman was the mother of one,
the grandmother of the other.

Pietro knelt by the pallet and tenderly kissed one transparent hand.
The great black eyes turned upon him wild and wide.

"Thou hast seen him, Pietro?" in a breathless sort of way. "Zara says
so."

"I have seen him, my mother; I have spoken to him. I spent hours with
Sir Jasper Kingsland last night."

"Thou didst?" Her words came pantingly, while passion throbbed in
every line of her face. "And there is a son--an heir?"

"There is."

She snatched her hand away and threw up her withered arms with a
vindictive shriek.

"And I lie here, a helpless log