flood
of anguish and remorse, the guilty man cried aloud in his despair and
fell prostrate beside the coffin, striking his head on its corner as he
sank unconscious to the floor.

Manasseh found him there and bore him back to his room. After putting
him to bed and ministering to his wants, he went out with Aaron to
prepare Anna's grave.

"We must make it wide enough for two," said he; "it was her wish."

When, after several hours of hard work, the two brothers returned home,
Manasseh went at once to his guest's room. Before his marriage this
chamber had been occupied by him, and he still used it occasionally for
writing. In his absence Vajdar had risen and seated himself at the desk.
Searching the drawer for writing-materials, he had come upon a sheet of
paper yellow with age, and written upon in ink now much faded. The
document proved to be a promissory note, but the signature was so
heavily scored through and through as to be hardly legible. Benjamin
Vajdar started violently as he took up the faded sheet and saw that the
man whom he had so feared and hated had, by his own voluntary act,
disarmed himself and put it out of his power to punish the fraud
practised upon him by his false friend. As if distrusting his own
constancy and the binding force of his promise to his sister, Manasseh
had, with a few strokes of his pen, rendered harmless what could
otherwise have been used as incriminating evidence against the forger.

On entering the room, Manasseh detected a peculiar odour in the air.
Benjamin Vajdar sat at the writing-desk, a morocco pocketbook open
before him. A half-finished letter lay under the writer's hand, but his
pen had ceased to move. His eyes met those of his host with a dull
stare.

"Don't come near me!" he cried, in warning. "Death is in this room!"

But Manasseh hurried to the window, threw it open, and then, snatching
up the pocketbook and the papers scattered over the desk, cast them all
into the fire that was burning on the hearth. Thus all the tell-tale
documents relating to certain fraudulent army contracts went up in
smoke, but not before they had done their deadly work on one, at least,
of the guilty men involved. Those papers had passed through the hands of
a second Lucretia Borgia, and not without reason had she applauded
herself that night at the opera when she permitted her dupe to extort
from her the little key which she wore in her bosom.

* * * * *