he evil one! Then she knelt----"

The Syndic uttered an involuntary cry.

"And prayed," Louis continued, confirming his astonishing statement by a
nod. "But whether to it--'twas on the table before her--or to the devil,
or otherwise, I know not. Only"--with damnatory candour--"it had a
strange aspect. Certainly she knelt, and it was on the table in front of
her, and her forehead rested on her hands, and----"

"What then? What then? By Heaven, the point!" gasped Blondel, writhing
in torture. "What then? blind worm that you are, can you not see that
you are killing me? What did she do with it? Tell me!"

"She poured it into a glass, and----"

"She drank it?"

"No, she carried it to her mother," Louis replied as slowly as he dared.
Fawning on the hand that had struck him, he would fain bite it if he
could do so safely. "I did not see what followed," he went on, "they
were behind the screen. But I heard her say that it was Madame's
medicine. And I made out enough----"

"Ah!"

"To be sure that her mother drank it."

Blondel stared at him a moment, wide-eyed; then, with a cry of despair,
bitter, final, indescribable, the Syndic turned and hurried away. He did
not hear the timid remonstrances which Louis, who followed a few paces
behind, ventured to utter. He did not heed the wondering looks of those
whom he jostled as he plunged into the current of passers and thrust his
way across the bridge in the direction whence he had come. The one
impulse in his blind brain was to get home, that he might be alone, to
think and moan and bewail himself unwatched; even as the first instinct
of the wounded beast is to seek its lair and lie hidden, there to await
with piteous eyes and the divine patience of animals the coming of
death.

But this man had the instinct only, not the patience. In his case would
come with thought wild rages, gnawings of regret, tears of blood. That
he might have, and had not, that he had failed by so little, that he
had been worsted by his own tools--these things and the bitter irony of
life's chances would madden and torment him. In an hour he would live a
lifetime of remorse; yet find in his worst moments no thought more
poignant than the reflection that had he played the game with courage,
had he grasped the nettle boldly, had he seized Basterga while it was
yet time, he might have lived! He might have lived! Ah, God!

Meanwhile Louis, though consumed with desire to see what would happen,
remaine