comparative retirement at
Balmoral, retaining Osborne as an alternative residence.]

CHAPTER XX.

BETWEEN TWO LIVES.

Six weeks after he had made his speech in the House of Lords,
Tremayne was sitting in his oak-panelled library at Alanmere, in deep
and earnest converse with a man who was sitting in an invalid chair
by a window looking out upon the lawn. The face of this man exhibited
a contrast so striking and at the same time terrible, that the most
careless glance cast upon it would have revealed the fact that it was
the face of a man of extraordinary character, and that the story of
some strange fate was indelibly stamped upon it.

The upper part of it, as far down as the mouth, was cast in a mould
of the highest and most intellectual manly beauty. The forehead was
high and broad and smooth, the eyebrows dark and firm but finely
arched, the nose somewhat prominently aquiline, but well shaped, and
with delicate, sensitive nostrils. The eyes were deep-set, large and
soft, and dark as the sky of a moonless night, yet shining in the
firelight with a strange magnetic glint that seemed to fasten
Tremayne's gaze and hold it at will.

But the lower portion of the face was as repulsive as the upper part
was attractive. The mouth was the mouth of a wild beast, and the lips
and cheeks and chin were seared and seamed as though with fire, and
what looked like the remains of a moustache and beard stood in black
ragged patches about the heavy unsightly jaws.

When the thick, shapeless lips parted, they did so in a hideous grin,
which made visible long, sharp white teeth, more like those of a wolf
than those of a human being.

His body, too, exhibited no less strange a contrast than his face
did. To the hips it was that of a man of well-knit, muscular frame,
not massive, but strong and well-proportioned. The arms were long and
muscular, and the hands white and small, but firm, well-shaped, and
nervous.

But from his hips downwards, this strange being was a dwarf and a
cripple. His hips were narrow and shrunken, one of his legs was some
inches shorter than the other, and both were twisted and distorted,
and hung helplessly down from the chair as he sat.

Such was Natas, the Master of the Terror, and the man whose wrongs,
whatever they might have been, had caused him to devote his life to a
work of colossal vengeance, and his incomparable powers to the
overthrow of a whole civilisation.

The tremendous task to