to carry them to
the carriages and remove them homeward. From the wardrobe of the
Astronaut, furnished anew for our voyage, I brought a long soft
therne-cloak, intended for Eveena's comfort; and wrapped in it all
that was left to us of the loveliest form and the noblest heart that
in two worlds ever belonged to woman. I shred one long soft tress of
mingled gold and brown from those with which my hand had played; I
kissed for the last time the lips that had so often counselled,
pleaded, soothed, and never spoken a word that had better been left
unsaid. Then, veiling face and form in the soft down, I called around
me again the brethren who had fallen back out of sight of my last
farewell, and gave the corpse into their charge. Turning with restless
eagerness from the agony, which even the sudden shock that rendered me
half insensible could not deaden into endurable pain, to the passion
of revenge, I led two or three of our party to the foot of the ladder
beneath the entrance window of my vessel, and was about in their
presence to explain his fate more fully to the struggling, howling
victim, half mad with protracted terror. But at that moment my purpose
was arrested. I had often repeated to Eveena passages from those
Terrestrial works whose purport most resembled that of the mystic
lessons she so deeply prized; and words, on which in life she had
especially dwelt, seemed now to be whispered in my ear or my heart by
the voice which with bodily sense I could never hear again:--
"Vengeance is Mine; I will repay." The absolute control of my will and
conscience, won by her perfect purity and unfailing rectitude,
outlasted Eveena's life. Turning to her murderer--

"You shall die," I said, "but you shall die not by revenge but by the
law; and not by your own law, but by that which, forbidding that
torture shall add to the sting of death, commands that 'Whoso sheddeth
man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.' Yet I cannot give you a
soldier's death," as my men levelled their weapons. Cutting the cord
that bound him, and grasping him from behind, I flung the wretch forth
from the summit far into the air; well assured that he would never
feel the blow that would dismiss his soul to its last account, before
that Tribunal to whose judgment his victim had appealed. Then I
entered the vessel, waved my hand in farewell to my comrades, and,
putting the machinery in action, rose from the surface and prepared to
quit a world which now