us. But the Sybilla Silver you knew was a
delusion. Behold the real one, for the first time in your life!"

"Woman, who are you? What are you?"

"I am the granddaughter of Zenith the gypsy, the woman your father
wronged to the death, and your bitterest enemy, Sir Everard Kingsland!"

"The granddaughter of Zenith the gypsy?" he repeated. "Then Sybilla
Silver is not your name?"

"The name is as false as the character in which she showed
herself--that of your friend."

"And yet, the first time we met you saved my life."

"No thanks for that. I did not know you, though if I had I would have
saved it, all the same. That was not the death you were to die. I
saved you for the gallows."

"Sybilla, Sybilla!"

"I saved you for the gallows!" she repeated. "I come here to-night to
tell you the truth, and you shall hear it. Did I not swear your life
away? Did I not nurse you back from the jaws of death? All for what?
That the astrologer's prediction might be fulfilled--that the heir of
Kingsland Court might die a felon's death on the scaffold!"

"The astrologer's prediction?" he cried, catching some of her
excitement. "What do you know about that?"

"Everything--everything!" she exclaimed, exultingly. "Far more than
you do, for you only know such a thing exists--you know nothing of its
contents. Oh, no! mamma guarded her darling boy too carefully for
that, notwithstanding your dying father's command. But in spite of her
it has come true."

"What was the astrologer's prediction--that terrible prediction that
shortened my father's life?"

"It was this--that his only son and heir, born on that night, would die
by the hand of the common hangman, a murderer's death on the scaffold.
Enough to blight any father's life who believed in it, was it not?"

"It was devilish. My poor father! Tell me the name of the fiend
incarnate who could do so diabolical a deed, for you know?"

"I do. That man was my father."

"Your father?"

"Ay, Achmet the Astrologer. Ha! ha! As much an astrologer as you or
I. It was his part of our vengeance--my part was to see it carried
out. I swore, by my dying mother's bedside, to devote my life to that
purpose. Have I not kept my oath?"

She folded her arms and looked at him with a face of devilish
malignity. He recoiled from her as from a visible demon.

"For God's sake, go! You bring a breath of hell into this prison.
Go--go! You have done your master's work. Leave me