s it--so help me
God in Heaven!"

Flora's last arrow was shivered: if she had had another in her quiver,
she would have had no courage to try it after hearing those terrible
words. She caught his hand, however, before he could guess her
intention, and pressed her lips upon it till they left their print
behind, and then she was gone. Her light foot hardly sounded as it
sprang down the stairs, but its faint echo was the last living sound
connected with Flora Bellasys that ever reached the ear of Guy
Livingstone.

When I heard more of the interview, I thought, and think still, that he
erred on the side of harshness. He was so fixed and steady in his
purpose that he could have afforded to have compromised a little in
expressing it. But he did things in his own way, and fought with his own
weapons--effective, but hardly to be wielded by most men, like the axe
of the King-maker or the bow of Odysseus. In carrying out his will, he
was apt to consider the softer feelings of others as little as he did
his own. It was just so with him when riding to hounds: he went as
straight as a line, and if he did not spare his horses, he certainly did
not himself.

To each man alive, one particular precept of the Christian code is
harder to realize and practice than all the rest put together. It was
this, perhaps, which drove the anchorites on from one degree of penance
to another, and made them so savage in self-tormenting. When the
macerated flesh had almost lost sensation, the thorn that had galled it
sometimes in their hot youth rankled incessantly, more venomous than
ever. That one injunction--"Forgive, as you would hope to be
forgiven"--was ever a stumbling-block to Guy.

Besides all this, he knew, better than any one, what sort of an
adversary he was contending against; one with whom each step in
negotiation or temporizing was a step toward discomfiture. It was like
the Spaniard with his _navaja_ against the sabre: your only chance is
keeping him steadily at the sword's-point, without breaking ground; if
he once gets under your guard, not all the saints in the calendar can
save you.

Perhaps, then, he was right, after all. Certainly Ralph Mohun thought
so, as he listened to a sketch of the proceedings with a grim
satisfaction edifying to witness.

As for me, before I went to bed that night, I read through those
chapters in the "Mort d'Arthur" that tell how the long, guilty loves of
Launcelot and Guenever ended. In the present