pressing both hands tightly on her temples, she sunk down at the feet
of her conductor, and sought in words to beseech his mercy; but her
white lips gave vent to no sound save a shriek, so wild that it
seemed, for the moment, to drown all other sorrows, and startle even
the human fiends around her. Her conductor himself started back; but
quickly recovering--

"Fool!" he muttered, as he rudely raised her. "I have no power to aid
thee; come before the Superior--we must all obey--ask him, implore
him, for mercy, not me."

He bore her roughly to a recess, divided off at the upper end of the
hall, by a thick black drapery, in which sat the Grand Inquisitor
and his two colleagues. One or two familiars were behind them, and a
secretary sat near a table covered with black cloth, and on which were
several writing implements. All wore masks of black crape, so thick
that not a feature could be discerned with sufficient clearness for
recognition elsewhere; yet, one glance on the stern, motionless
figure, designated as the Grand Inquisitor, sufficed to bid every drop
of blood recede from the prisoner's heart with human terror, at the
very same moment that it endowed the _woman_ with such supernatural
fortitude that her very form seemed to dilate, and her large eye and
lovely mouth expressed--if it could be, in such a scene and such
an hour--unutterable scorn. Antipathy, even as love, will pierce
disguise; and that one glance, lit up with almost bewildering light,
in the prisoner's mind, link after link of what had before been
impenetrable mystery. Her husband's discovery of her former love for
Arthur; his murder; the suspicion thrown on Stanley; her own summons
as witness against him; her present danger; all, all were traced to
one individual, one still working and most guilty passion, which she,
in her gentle purity and holy strength, had scorned. She could not
be deceived--the mystery that surrounded him was solved--antipathy
explained; and Marie's earthly fate lay in Don Luis Garcia's hands!
The Grand Inquisitor read in that glance that he was known; and for
a brief minute a strange, an incomprehensible sensation, thrilled
through him. It could scarcely have been fear, when one gesture of
his hand would destine that frail being to torture, imprisonment, and
death; and yet never before in his whole life of wickedness, had he
experienced such a feeling as he did at that moment beneath a woman's
holy gaze. Anger at himself for th