ow this
much before you die. Know then that when your grandfather was a rich
man by this friend's aid--after, with this friend's help, he had laid
hands on the secret of the Great Ruby for which for many a year he
had thirsted, in the moment of his triumph he turned and slew that
friend in order to keep the Ruby to himself.

"That fool, your father, kept a Journal--which no doubt you have read
over and over again. Did he tell you how I caught him upon Adam's
Peak, sitting with this clasp in his hands before a hideous, graven
stone? That stone was cut in ghastly mockery of that friend's face;
the bones that lay beneath it were the bones of that friend.
There, on that very spot where I met your father face to face, did
his father, Amos Trenoweth, strike down my father Ralph Colliver.

"Ah, light is beginning to dawn on your silly brain at last!
Yes, pretending to protect the old priest who had the Ruby, he
stabbed my father with the very knife found in your father's heart,
stabbed him before his wife's eyes on that little lawn upon the
mountain-side; and, when my helpless mother called vengeance upon
him, handed the still reeking knife to her and bade her do her worst.
Ah, but she kept that knife. Did you mark what was engraved upon the
blade? That knife had a good memory, Mr. Jasper Trenoweth.

"Let me go on. As if that deed were not foul enough, he caused the
old priest to carve--being skilful with the chisel--that vile
distortion of his dead friend's face out of a huge boulder lying by,
and then murdered him too for the Ruby's sake, and tumbled their
bodies into the trough together. Such was Amos Trenoweth. Are you
proud of your descent?

"I never saw my father. I was not born until three months after
this, and not until I was ten years old did my mother tell me of his
fate.

"Your grandfather was a fool, Jasper Trenoweth, to despise her; for
she was young then and she could wait. She was beautiful then, and
Amos Trenoweth himself had loved her. What is she now? Speak, for
you have seen her."

As he spoke I seemed to see again that yellow face, those awful,
soulless eyes, and hear her laugh as she gazed down from the box upon
my dying love.

"Ah, beauty goes. It went for ever on that day when Amos Trenoweth
spat in her face and taunted her as she clung to the body of her
husband. Beauty goes, but revenge can wait; to-night it has come;
to-night a thousand dead men's ghosts shall be glad, and poi