all be there and play the part allotted to
you from the beginning. Do you believe?"

"Yes," replied Tremayne, rising wearily from his chair, "I believe;
and as the task is, so may Heaven make my strength in the stress of
battle!"

"Amen!" said Natas very solemnly.

That night the young Lord of Alanmere went sleepless to bed, and lay
awake till dawn, revolving over and over again in his mind the
marvellous things that he had seen and heard, and the tremendous task
to which he had now irrevocably committed himself for good or evil.
In all these waking dreams there was ever present before his mental
vision the face of a woman whose beauty was like and yet unlike that
of the daughter of Natas. It lacked the brilliance and subtle charm
which in Natasha so wondrously blended the dusky beauty of the
daughters of the South with the fairer loveliness of the daughters of
the North; but it atoned for this by that softer grace and sweetness
which is the highest charm of purely English beauty.

It was the face of the woman whom, in that portion of his strange
double life which had been free from the mysterious influence of
Natas, he had loved with well-assured hope that she would one day
rule his house and broad domains with him. She was now Lady Muriel
Penarth, the daughter of Lord Marazion, a Cornish nobleman, whose
estates abutted on those which belonged to Lord Alanmere as Baron
Tremayne, of Tremayne, in the county of Cornwall, as the _Peerage_
had it. Noble alike by lineage and nature, no fairer mistress could
have been found for the lands of Tremayne and Alanmere, but--what
seas of blood and flame now lay between him and the realisation of
his love-ideal!

He must forsake his own, and become a revolutionary and an outcast
from Society. He must draw the sword upon the world and his own race,
and, armed with the most awful means of destruction that the wit of
man had ever devised, he must fight his way through universal war to
that peace which alone he could ask her to share with him. Still much
could be done before he took the final step of severance which might
be perpetual, and he would lose no time in doing it.

As soon as it was fairly light, he rose and took a long, rapid walk
over the home park, and when he returned to breakfast at nine he had
resolved to execute forthwith a deed of gift, transferring the whole
of his vast property, which was unentailed and therefore entirely at
his own disposal, to the woman who