arrel once and for
all. You are weak from sickness I know, but what am I who have spent
certain days and nights in this hell of yours. We should be well
matched, de Garcia.'

'Perhaps so, Cousin, but where is the need? To be frank, things have not
gone over well with me when we stood face to face before, and it is odd,
but do you know, I have been troubled with a foreboding that you would
be the end of me. That is one of the reasons why I sought a change
of air to these warmer regions. But see the folly of forebodings, my
friend. I am still alive, though I have been ill, and I mean to go on
living, but you are--forgive me for mentioning it--you are already dead.
Indeed those gentlemen,' and he pointed to the two black men who
were taking advantage of our talk to throw into the sea the slave
who followed me up the hatchway, 'are waiting to put a stop to our
conversation. Have you any message that I can deliver for you? If
so, out with it, for time is short and that hold must be cleared by
daybreak.'

'I have no message to give you from myself, though I have a message for
you, de Garcia,' I answered. 'But before I tell it, let me say a word.
You seem to have won, wicked murderer as you are, but perhaps the game
is not yet played. Your fears may still come true. I am dead, but my
vengeance may yet live on, for I leave it to the Hand in which I should
have left it at first. You may live some years longer, but do you think
that you shall escape? One day you will die as surely as I must die
to-night, and what then, de Garcia?'

'A truce, I pray you,' he said with a sneer. 'Surely you have not
been consecrated priest. You had a message, you said. Pray deliver it
quickly. Time presses, Cousin Wingfield. Who sends messages to an exile
like myself?'

'Isabella de Siguenza, whom you cheated with a false marriage and
abandoned,' I said.

He started from his chair and stood over me.

'What of her?' he whispered fiercely.

'Only this, the monks walled her up alive with her babe.'

'Walled her up alive! Mother of God! how do you know that?'

'I chanced to see it done, that is all. She prayed me to tell you of
her end and the child's, and that she died hiding your name, loving and
forgiving. This was all her message, but I will add to it. May she haunt
you for ever, she and my mother; may they haunt you through life and
death, through earth and hell.'

He covered his face with his hands for a moment, then dropping them san