id, waving his hand
toward the interior, 'I could have bribed and shot my way to the throne
of Albania. Don't you realize what that means to a man like me? There is
still a chance and if I could keep your wife alive, if I could see her
broken in reason and in health, a poor, skeleton, gibbering thing that
knelt at my feet when I came near her I should recover the mastery of
myself. Believe me,' he said, nodding his head, 'your wife will have the
best medical advice that it is possible to obtain.'

"Kara went out and I did not see him again for a very long time. He sent
word, just a scrawled note in the morning, to say my wife had died."

John Lexman rose up from his seat, and paced the apartment, his head
upon his breast.

"From that moment," he said, "I lived only for one thing, to punish
Remington Kara. And gentlemen, I punished him."

He stood in the centre of the room and thumped his broad chest with his
clenched hand.

"I killed Remington Kara," he said, and there was a little gasp of
astonishment from every man present save one. That one was T. X.
Meredith, who had known all the time.

CHAPTER XXII

After a while Lexman resumed his story.

"I told you that there was a man at the palazzo named Salvolio. Salvolio
was a man who had been undergoing a life sentence in one of the prisons
of southern Italy. In some mysterious fashion he escaped and got across
the Adriatic in a small boat. How Kara found him I don't know. Salvolio
was a very uncommunicative person. I was never certain whether he was
a Greek or an Italian. All that I am sure about is that he was the most
unmitigated villain next to his master that I have ever met.

"He was a quick man with his knife and I have seen him kill one of the
guards whom he had thought was favouring me in the matter of diet with
less compunction than you would kill a rat.

"It was he who gave me this scar," John Lexman pointed to his cheek.
"In his master's absence he took upon himself the task of conducting
a clumsy imitation of Kara's persecution. He gave me, too, the only
glimpse I ever had of the torture poor Grace underwent. She hated dogs,
and Kara must have come to know this and in her sleeping room--she was
apparently better accommodated than I--he kept four fierce beasts so
chained that they could almost reach her.

"Some reference to my wife from this low brute maddened me beyond
endurance and I sprang at him. He whipped out his knife and struck at