TRUTH IN THE MARVELLOUS.

Antiquarian research, conducted in the prosaic spirit of the present day, has dealt cruel blows at many time-honoured traditions. We are taught that the story of the siege of Troy was a mere romance—that Troy itself never existed; that Arthur’s Round Table was a myth; that the accidental appearance of a Countess’s garter at a ball was not responsible for the institution of the highest order of knighthood; that a certain other Countess never freed the citizens of Coventry by riding through their streets with innocence for her only dress; that the Maid of Orleans was never burned, but married, and lived happy ever afterwards. We hardly know what historic relation we are to be allowed to believe. While, however, historical inquiry has discredited many pleasant stories, hard science has come to the aid of romance, and has testified to the veracity of some narrators who have been accused of imposing on the credulity of the ignorant and superstitious by the relation of wonders unworthy of credence in enlightened times. The stories of the appearance in the heavens of blazing sceptres, fiery serpents, and swords of fire dipped in blood, when read in the light of the calm and unbiased observations of some meteors in recent times, are descriptions of physical phenomena sufficiently rare to be accounted supernatural by nations whose acquaintance with the heavenly bodies did not extend beyond the regular movements of the sun, moon, and planets. There is no doubt that the authors of these accounts related truthfully what they saw, employing the language which best conveyed their impressions.

With what awe the visit of a meteorite may be regarded, even in this nineteenth century, by unlearned country-folk, may be gathered from the account of one which fell at Juvenas, in Ardèche, on the 15th of June 1821, and which formed the subject of a curious procès verbal drawn up by the mayor of the commune. It was first seen at three P.M. as a fireball, in a clear sky, while the sun was shining brightly; and it sunk five feet into the ground. The inhabitants were so alarmed, that it was more than a week before they could make up their minds to search for this strange visitant. ‘They deliberated for a long time whether they should go armed to undertake this operation, which appeared so dangerous; but Claude Serre, the sexton, justly observed that if it was the Evil One, neither powder nor arms would prevail against him—that holy-water would be more effectual; and that he would undertake to make the evil spirit fly;’ after which reassuring speech, they set to work and dug up the aërolite, which weighed over two hundred pounds.

We read in the classic poets that on certain momentous occasions, statues have been so affected as to perspire, as if they were living human beings. These stories have been passed over as mere poetic fictions; but probably they rest on a substantial foundation. The phenomenon is doubtless that which is observed when a fire has been lighted for the first time in a room which has for a lengthened period been allowed to remain cold: the walls and other objects are seen to run down with moisture, which appears as if exuded from their surface. The same thing occurs when a long-continued frost is succeeded by mild weather. The appearance is familiar enough to us, who are accustomed to sudden variations of temperature; but in warmer and more equable climates, the requisite conditions are probably rare; and the appearance of copious moisture on statues composed of substances on which dew is not commonly found, may well have been accounted a prodigy.

We may not be disposed to admit that the fiery cross seen by Constantine was a miraculous intimation; but we cannot set aside the account as necessarily apocryphal; for a celestial cross was seen in Migné, near Poitiers, in December 1826. It was observed during a religious service, and the preacher in his sermon had referred to the cross of Constantine. The awe-struck congregation, on perceiving the visible cross in the sky, of shining silver, edged with red, immediately fell upon their knees, accepting the sign as a divine testimony to the truth of what had just been told them. The source of the phenomenon was afterwards found in a wooden cross which had been erected near the chapel, the shadow of which had been cast by the declining sun on a rising mist.

The Flying Dutchman was obviously another instance of atmospheric reflection, and similar phantom ships have been described by modern travellers. The Enchanted Island, or Isle of Ghosts, which had its place in old charts in the mid-Atlantic, and so perplexed the mariners of the middle ages by its varying appearance, defying all attempts to reach its shores, has since been recognised as a fogbank.

Among the wonders recorded in the reign of William Rufus, it is said that on a night in 1095, the stars seemed falling like a shower of rain from heaven to earth, or, according to the Chronicle of Reims, were driven like dust before the wind. A tradition is recorded as prevailing in Thessaly that on a certain night in August the heavens were opened and burning torches were seen through the aperture. These are clearly but highly coloured accounts, by persons of limited knowledge of natural phenomena, of specially brilliant displays of shooting-stars. The last corresponds with the August meteors.

Bartholin, in his History of Anatomy, speaks of a patrician lady of Verona, Catherine, wife of J. Franciscus Rambaldus, whose skin sparkled with fire when slightly touched. ‘This noble lady,’ he says, ‘the Creator endued with so stupendous a dignity and prerogative of nature, that as oft as her body was but lightly touched with linen, sparks flew out plentifully from her limbs, apparent to her domestic servants, as if they had been struck out of a flint, accompanied also with a noise that was to be heard by all. Oftentimes, when she rubbed her hands upon the sleeve of her smock that contained the sparks within it, she observed a flame with a tailed ray running about, as fired exhalations are wont to do.... This fire was not to be seen but in the dark or in the night, nor did it burn without itself, though combustible matter was applied to it.’ This description of electric sparks is such as would be given by a person who saw the phenomenon for the first time and was ignorant of its cause. The same appearance is sometimes seen by persons of the present generation when divesting themselves of tight-fitting underclothing, and especially when combing their hair with a vulcanite comb; but probably it shows itself only with persons of peculiar constitution.

It is hardly necessary to advert to the part which comets have played in the annals of supernatural manifestations. In classic times, however low the state of knowledge may have been in other departments of physical science, the celestial bodies were never without intelligent observers, and the ancient astronomers no doubt acknowledged comets as having their place in the planetary or sidereal economy. But this knowledge was confined to the learned; to the common people, comets were chariots of fire conveying departed heroes to the abode of demigods. A splendid comet luckily appeared after the death of Julius Cæsar, and confirmed his title to divine honours. In the dark ages, comets were celestial portents, presages of revolution or pestilence. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was accounted profane scepticism to attribute their appearance to natural causes; and even as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century, we find an intelligent writer on the natural curiosities of the world adopting the view that these bodies are not allowed to appear except with the special permission of Divine providence, for a specific purpose, in opposition to the theories of astronomers, who are twitted with assigning long periods to the orbits of comets in order that the predictions of their reappearance may not be falsified in the lifetime of the persons making them.

Whether it was owing to the improved means of spreading intelligence afforded by the invention of printing, or to the excitement of men’s minds consequent upon the political and social events of the time, the sixteenth century was prolific in stories of wonderful sights in the heavens and on the earth. Of the many marvellous accounts then circulated, we select the following, which forms the subject of a tract by Abraham Fleming, and purports to have been taken from the evidence of eye-witnesses. The account is titled, ‘A Straunge and Terrible Wunder wrought very late in the Parish Church of Bungay—namely, the fourth of this August in the yeere of Our Lord 1577 ... with the appearance of an horrible shaped thing sensibly perceived of the people then and there assembled.’ The account is couched in terms appropriate to the solemnity of a special manifestation from the spiritual world, and is interspersed with ejaculations expressive of the awe which filled the people’s minds at their witnessing the occurrences described; but the incidents, briefly told, are as follows: A storm of extraordinary fury was raging while the congregation were assembled at divine service; rain came down like a deluge, lightning flashed, and thunder pealed, so that not only dumb creatures were disquieted, but ‘senseless things void of all life and feeling shook and trembled;’ in other words, the fabric and furniture of the building were shaken by the violence of the storm. While the tempest was at its height, a visitor from the lower regions (as the narrator evidently believed) made his appearance in the midst of the congregation, in the form, ‘as they might discerne it,’ of a dog, of a black colour; ‘the sight whereof, together with the fearful flashes of fire which then were seene, moved such admiration in the mindes of the assemblie that they thought doome’s day was already come.’ The ‘Evil One in such a likenesse’ ran with extraordinary speed down the body of the church among the people. Passing between two persons who were on their knees apparently engaged in prayer, he wrung the necks of both of them in an instant, so that they died where they knelt. As he passed by another man he ‘gave him such a gripe on the back that therewithal he was presently drawen togither and shrunk up as it were a piece of lether scorched in a hot fire; or as the mouth of a purse or bag drawn togither with a string.’ This man, however, did not die. Meanwhile, the parish clerk, who was cleaning out the gutter of the church, also saw the ‘horrible shaped thing,’ and was struck to the ground with a violent clap of thunder, but beyond his fall, was not harmed. The stones of the church and the church door, on being afterwards examined, bore evidence of the power of the demon in the marks of his claws or talons; and all the wires, the wheels, and other things belonging to the clock, were wrung in sunder and broken in pieces.

A similar occurrence is stated to have been witnessed the same day at Blibery, a village seven miles from Bungay. In this case, the demon planted himself upon the rood-loft, from which he flung himself down into the church, and after killing two men and a lad, and burning the hand of another person, flew out of the church ‘in a hideous likeness.’

Before dismissing this story as a fable, bred of the imagination of people terror-stricken by the storm, let us compare it with the account of an occurrence which took place on Malvern Hills on the 1st of July 1826. A party had taken refuge in an iron-roofed hut from an impending storm, and were about to partake of refreshment when the storm came on. A gentleman who was standing at the eastern entrance—the storm had come from the west—saw what seemed to him to be a ball of fire moving along the surface of the ground. It came up and entered the hut, forcing him, as it did so, several paces forward from the doorway. An explosion followed, described by the inhabitants of the village at the foot of the hill (Great Malvern) as terrific. On going in, as soon as he had recovered from the shock, to look after his sisters, he found them on the floor, fainting, as he thought, from terror. Two of them had died instantly; and a third lady, with others of the party, were injured. An examination of the hut showed a large crack in the side opposite to that at which the fireball had entered, leading up to a window, and the iron roof above this was indented.

The correspondence of the leading circumstances of this account with Fleming’s story is remarkable; and had the Malvern incident occurred in the superstitious sixteenth century instead of the scientific nineteenth, it would no doubt have been regarded as a supernatural visitation, and have furnished just such a marvellous story as that of Bungay. In both cases, something was seen to enter a building during a thunderstorm, killing two persons instantly and injuring others, disappearing with a noise described in the one case as a violent clap of thunder, and in the other as a terrific explosion, and leaving behind visible marks of its progress in the material of the building. In each instance, too, a person stationed outside saw something which drove him from his place, but otherwise did not harm him; and in both cases the body, whatever it was, which seemed to be the immediate source of the mischief had a progressive motion, which, though swift, could be followed by the eye. The chief point of difference is in the appearance presented by the vehicle of the destructive agent. In the one case it is likened to a black dog, and in the other to a ball of fire, and it may be said that no two things could be more unlike. As to the form of the so-called dog, little need be said. It is admitted that the church at the time was in such a state of ‘palpable darknesse’ that one person could not perceive another; and in the dark, any ill-defined object that can be perceived at all has a tendency to assume a fantastic shape. It was accompanied by ‘fearful flashes of fire,’ which seem to be distinguished from the lightning, and the effect on those who were touched by it was that of scorching or burning. Whether the vehicle which brought the destructive force into the church, and which was thought to be a fiend, was a mass of highly charged smoke or dust, or a miniature cloud of the kind which, on a grand scale, passed over Malta on the 29th of October 1757, the effects described correspond so entirely with those known to result from a particular kind of thunderstroke, that we cannot accuse the author of writing otherwise than in good faith. The supernatural colouring may fairly be ascribed to want of knowledge in regard to a subject which, even now, is but imperfectly understood. The Malta storm-cloud, which destroyed nearly two hundred lives, and laid in ruins almost everything in its way, is described by Brydone as being at first black, afterwards changing its colour till it became like a flame of fire mixed with black smoke; but he reports that despite the scientific explanations of this extraordinary storm-cloud, the people declared with one voice that it was a legion of demons let loose to punish them for their sins. There were, says he, a thousand people in Malta that were ready to take their oath that they saw the fiends within the cloud, ‘all as black as pitch, and breathing out fire and brimstone.’

Besides those mentioned above, many other strange stories might be instanced which, at the time, were accepted as true accounts of supernatural appearances; and afterwards, when the general belief in spiritual manifestations declined, were denounced as false, because contrary to nature, but have since been recognised as consistent with natural laws. By taking into account the surrounding circumstances, the state of knowledge at the time, the customary modes of expression, &c., we may, from many stories at first sight incredible, arrive at a substratum of truth which may form a valuable addition to the sum of human knowledge. Imbued with a sense of their own superior wisdom, learned men, and others who have thought themselves learned, have sometimes rashly pronounced as impossible, and therefore untrue, phenomena which have since been accepted as facts. In Arago’s Popular Astronomy is an account of a meteorite which struck the earth at Lucé, in the year 1769. It was perceived in the sky by several persons, who watched its progress until it reached the surface of the earth, when it was at once picked up and preserved; but the Academy of Sciences pronounced it impossible for a solid body to have fallen from the heavens. On the 24th of July 1790, a quantity of these stones fell at St Juliac—in the fields, on the roofs of the houses, and in the streets of the village. The fall was preceded by what is described as the passing of a great fire, after which was heard in the air a very loud and extraordinary noise. The facts were certified by the municipality of the place and by some hundreds of the inhabitants; but the affair was treated in the public journals as a ridiculous tale, calculated to excite the compassion not merely of savants, but of all reasonable persons.

Modern scientific research, while continually giving us fresh revelations of that order in nature which is its supreme law, is at the same time constantly narrowing the domain of the impossible. Even the wild dreams of the alchemist appear, to the chemist and physicist of to-day, less groundless than they did eighty or a hundred years ago. The present century, the age of the railway, the electric light, the telegraph and telephone, is certainly not less replete with marvels than any of its predecessors. Many of the achievements of applied science, to which we have now become habituated, if they could have been related to a person living in the middle ages, would make as great demands upon his credulity as the most wonderful stories of past times do upon ours, and problems which have baffled the genius of all past ages, and the insolvability of which had come to be regarded as a matter of faith, have been solved in our own time. And yet we have no ground for assuming that we have approached a limit in the field of discovery, or for claiming finality in our interpretations of nature. We have lifted a corner of the curtain, and are enabled to peep at some of the machinery by which her operations are effected, but much more remains concealed, and we know not what marvels may yet in course of time be made clear to us. There are doubtless more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of—even in our philosophy.

BY ORDER OF THE LEAGUE.

BY FRED. M. WHITE.

IN TWENTY CHAPTERS.—CHAP. IV.

Five years have passed away, bringing strange changes and startling revolutions—years, to some, fraught with misery and regret; years, to others, which have been pregnant with fame and honour; but to the suffering, patient world, only another step nearer to eternity. Five years later, and night in the small German town where honour is wrecked and lives are lost on the hazard of a die. The Kursaal at Homburg sparkling with the glitter of ten thousand lights. Men of all nations were gathered there, drawn together by the strongest cords which bind human destiny—the power of gold. No type of face was wanting; no passion, no emotion that the human visage is capable of, but had its being there: rage, despair, misery, exultation—the whole gamut of man’s passions and triumphs. Women were there too. The bluest-blood recorded in the Almanach de Gotha did not disdain to rub elbows with the last fancy from the Comédie Française; my lord, cold, indifferent, and smiling, sat side by side with the reckless plunger who would have bartered his honour, had that commodity remained to him, for the gold to place upon the colour. On the long green tables, the glittering coins fell with a subdued chink sweeter than the finest music to the hungry ears; a republic the most perfect in the universe, where rich and poor alike are welcomed, with one great destiny—to lose or to gain. There were no wild lamentations there; such vulgar exhibitions were out of place, though feeling cannot be disguised under the deepest mask, for a tremor of the eyelid, a flash of the eye, a convulsive movement of the fingers, betray poor human nature. As the game proceeded with the monotonous cry of the croupier, it was awful to watch the intentness of the faces, how they deepened in interest as the game was made, bending forward till at length ‘Rouge perd et couleur’ came from the level voice again.

The croupiers raked in the glittering stacks of gold, silently, swiftly, but with as much emotion as a child would gather cowslips, and threw the winning on each stake as calmly, knowing full well that in the flight of time it must return. The piles were raked up, and then arose a murmur, a confusion of tongues, reminding the spectator of what the bewilderment at Babel must have been, a clamour which died away to silence at the inthralling ‘Faites votre jeu.’

How the hands clawed at the sparkling treasure; eager, trembling avarice in every finger-tip; from the long, lean, yellow claw of the old withered gamester, to the plump little hand of the bride, who is trying her fortune with silver, fearful lest, driven by despair, some less fortunate player should lay felonious fingers upon the piled-up treasure.

Standing behind the all-absorbed group was a young man with pale, almost ghostly features, and a heavy dark moustache. From his attitude and smile, it was hard to say how fortune had served him, for his face was void of any emotion. He held one piece of gold in his hand, placed it on a colour, waited, and lost. A trifling movement of his lips, pressed tightly together under the dark moustache—that was all. Then for a moment he hesitated, pondered, and suddenly, as if to settle the matter quickly, he detached a coin from his watchchain and leaned forward again. Under him, seated at the table, was a woman winning steadily. A pile of gold was before her; she was evidently in the luckiest vein. The man, with all a gambler’s superstition, placed the coin in her hand. ‘Stake for me,’ he whispered; ‘you have the luck.’

Mechanically, she took the proffered coin, and turned it in her hand; then suddenly a wave of crimson, succeeded by a deathly whiteness, came across her face. She held the coin, then put it carefully aside, and staked another in its place. Then, apparently forgetting her emotion in the all-absorbing interest of the game, she looked at the table. ‘Rouge gagne, et couleur perd,’ came the chant of the croupier. The stakes were raked in, and the money lost. Under his breath, the man uttered a fervent imprecation, slightly shrugged his shoulders, and turned to watch the game again. From that moment the woman lost; her pile dwindled away to one coin beyond the piece of metal tendered her to stake, but still she played on, the man behind watching her play intently. A little varying luck, at one moment a handful of napoleons, at another, reduced to one, the game proceeded. At length the last but one was gone, save the piece tendered to her by the man behind the chair; that she never parted with. As she sat there, words came to her ears vaguely—the voice of the man behind her, and every time he spoke she shivered, as if a cold breath were passing through her heart. A temporary run of luck came to her aid, and so she sat, listening and playing.

The new-comer was another man, evidently an Italian, fine, strong, with an open face and dark passionate eyes. He touched the first man upon the shoulder lightly, speaking in excellent English.

There were four actors there, playing, had they but known it, a ghastly tragedy. The two men were players; the listening woman was another; and across the table, behind the spectators, stood a girl. She had a dark southern face of great beauty—a face cleanly chiselled, and lighted by a pair of wondrous black eyes—eyes bent upon the two men and the woman, playing now with the keenest interest. She shrank back a little as the new-comer entered, and her breath came a little quicker; but there she stayed, watching and waiting for some opportunity. Her look boded ill for some one. Meanwhile, the unconscious actors fixed their attention on the game. The last arrival touched the other man upon the elbow again, a little roughly this time.

‘You have been playing again, Hector?’ he said.

‘I have been playing my friend—yes. It is not in my nature to be in such a place without. What would you have me do, Luigi? I am dying of ennui from this inaction—kicking up my heels here waiting for orders.’

‘I should have thought you could have found something better to occupy your time,’ the man addressed as Luigi returned. ‘Our work is too stern, too holy, to be shared with such frivolity as this. Gold, gold, with no thoughts of anything but this maddening scramble!’

‘My dear Luigi, pray, control yourself. Are you not aware that this sort of thing has been done to death? Do not, as you love me, descend to the level of the descriptive journalist, who comes over here to coin his superlative condemnatory adjectives into money—to lose at this very interesting game. John Bull holds up his hands in horror as he reads the description in his Telegraph, and then he comes to try his luck himself. I, Hector le Gautier, have seen a bishop here.’

‘How fond you are of the sound of your own voice,’ Luigi Salvarini returned. ‘Come outside; I have something important to say to you.’

‘Something connected with the League, I suppose,’ Le Gautier yawned. ‘If it was not yourself I was talking to, I should say, confusion to the League.’

‘How rash you are!’ Salvarini returned in a low tone, accompanied by an admiring glance at his companion. ‘Consider what one word spoken lightly might mean to you. The attendants here, the croupier even, might be a Number in the League.’

‘Very likely,’ Le Gautier replied carelessly; ‘but it is not probable that, if I should whisper the magic words in his ear, he would give me credit for a few napoleons. I am in no mood for business to-night, Luigi; and if you are the good fellow I take you for, you will lend me’——

‘One Brother must always aid another according to his means, says the decree. But, alas! I have nothing.—I came to you with the intention’——

‘Oh, did you?’ Le Gautier asked sardonically. ‘Then, in that case, I must look elsewhere; a few francs is all my available capital.’

‘Hector,’ the Italian exclaimed suddenly, in a hoarse whisper, ‘where is the?’—— He did not finish his sentence, but pointed to the watchchain the other was idly twirling in his fingers.

Le Gautier smiled sarcastically. ‘It is gone,’ he said lightly—‘gone to swell the bloated coffers of the bank. Fortune, alas! had no favour even for that mystic coin. Sacred as it should have been, I am its proud possessor no more.’

‘You are mad, utterly mad!’ Salvarini exclaimed. ‘If it were but known—if it has fallen into the hands of the bank, or a croupier happens to have a Number, think of what it means to you! The coin would be forwarded to the Central Council; the signs would be called in; yours missing’——

‘And one of these admirable German daggers would make acquaintance with my estimable person, with no consolation but the fact of knowing what a handsome corpse I shall make. Bah! A man can only die once, and so long as they do not make me the posthumous hero of a horrible tragedy, I do not care. It is not so very serious, my Luigi.’

‘It is serious; you know it is,’ Luigi retorted. ‘No Brother of the League would have had the sublime audacity, the reckless courage’——

‘L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace,’ Le Gautier returned. ‘I sigh for new temptations; the sight of the gaming-table is to me what the smell of battle afar off is to the war-horse. I came here intending to risk a louis; I have lost everything. There is nothing like courage at the tables; and as it had a spice of danger in it, I risked’——

‘Your life! You do not seem to comprehend the danger.’

‘But, my dear friend, it is exactly that spice of danger that gives the thing its nameless charm. Come, you are hipped, out of sorts. You see the duties of the Order in every action; you see the uplifting of the avenging dagger in every shadow that trembles on the wall. Be a man!’

‘I am all the more disturbed,’ Salvarini observed with moody, uneasy face, ‘that the orders have come. That is the principal reason I am here to look for you. We are translated to London.’

‘That is good news, at anyrate,’ Le Gautier exclaimed briskly. ‘I have been literally dying to get back there. By the bright eyes of Enid—— What is that?’

Above the clamour of tongues and the rattle of the gold pieces, a low laugh was heard distinctly close to the speaker’s elbow. He turned sharply round; but there was no one within a few feet of them. Apparently, it had not disturbed the inthralled players, though the croupier swept his cold eye around to discover the author of this unseemly mirth.

‘Strange!’ Le Gautier observed. ‘I seem to have heard that laugh before, though I cannot remember where.’

‘And so have I,’ Salvarini whispered hoarsely—‘only once, and I hope that I may never hear it again. It is horrible!’

Le Gautier looked at his companion, amazed to see the agitation pictured on his face. It was white and drawn, as if with some inward pain. Salvarini wiped his damp brow as he met the other’s piercing gaze, and tried to still the trembling of his limbs.

‘A passing fancy,’ he explained—‘a fancy which called up a remembrance of my boyhood, the recollection of a vengeance as yet unpaid.—But I am idling; let us get outside. The orders have come, as I tell you, for London. We are to meet the Head Centre at the old address.’

‘And how did the orders come?’ Le Gautier asked.

‘The old mysterious way,’ was the impatient reply; ‘secrecy and darkness; no trust in any one, however worthy he may have proved—the old suspicion, which drags us down, and holds our hands even in the act of striking. I found them on my table when I got in. You and I are to get to London, and there await orders. Our instructions bear the crossed daggers, indicating extreme secrecy and a mission of great danger.’

In spite of his sang froid, Le Gautier could not repress a slight start; and a smile of covert sarcasm, pity almost, rose to his lips as he looked in his companion’s eager, enthusiastic face; the same sort of pity the sharper feels for his unconscious victim when he has him within the toils. Not that the younger man noticed this; his eyes were full of some far-away project, something noble, by their expression.

‘The old story of the monkey and the chestnuts,’ Le Gautier observed with his most sinister smile; ‘the puppets run the risk, and the Head Centres get the glory. If we fall, it is in freedom’s name. That is sufficient epitaph for us poor, silly, fluttering moths.’

‘But the glory of it!’ Salvarini cried—‘think of that!’

‘The glory, yes—the glory of a felon’s grave! The glory lies in the uncertainty. What do we gain, you and I, by the removal of crowned heads? When the last tyrant fell at our leader’s dictate, how much did we benefit by the blow? He was not a bad man; for a king, he was just.’

‘You are in a bitter mood, to-night, Hector,’ Salvarini answered. ‘What will you say when I tell you the appointment has come with your nomination as a Deputy, with a seat at the Council of the Crimson Nine?’

‘My appointment at last! You are joking, Luigi. Surely they had need of better men than I. What of La Fontaine?’

‘Dead,’ Salvarini responded grimly. ‘Treachery was suspected, and it was necessary to remove him.—But what I tell you is true; you are ordered to be present at the next Council at Warsaw, two months hence, when you will give up your badge as an Avenger, and take the premier order.’

‘And I have staked it to-night on the hazard of a die!’ Le Gautier exclaimed, pallid even beyond his usual deathly whiteness. ‘Fool, fool that I was! How can I prevent it becoming known? I am undone!’

‘You do not know the worst,’ Salvarini replied. ‘Come closer, and let me whisper in your ears; even the walls carry such tidings. The Supreme Director is here!’

Le Gautier turned faint and sick as he looked furtively round the room, with its long mirrors and barbaric splendour.

‘Suppose you lend me yours?’ he suggested. ‘You will not want it now. What a mad fool I have been! I wonder if there is any way of recovering it? for I must have it, come what will. With a penalty of’——

‘Death!’

The word, abruptly, sternly uttered, was followed by the same low mocking laugh they had heard before. They looked around in alarm, but no trace of any one could be seen. Standing in the recess of a window, they looked out; but no sign of the mysterious warning, so strangely given.

‘Let us get away from this,’ Le Gautier groaned. ‘I am stifled! Come outside into the open air. My nerves must be unstrung to-night.’

They walked out through the high folding-doors, and disappeared in the darkness. As they left, the woman who had been playing rose from her seat and followed them. Apparently, she was too late, for they had vanished; and with a sigh, she abandoned her evident intention, turning into the Kursaal gardens and throwing herself into a seat. Directly she quitted the saloon, the woman with the dark eyes followed, and tracked the other to the quiet retreat. For some time she stood behind the shadow of a tree, watching her. It was a brilliant moonlight night—clear, calm, and peaceful. Without there, the lighted windows of the gambling saloon could be seen; and ever and anon the murmur of the croupier, the scrape of the rakes, and the subdued clink of the gold, might be heard. But the figure on the seat did not heed these things; she was looking at a coin in her hand, making out as she best could the devices that it bore, strange and puzzling to her.

It was merely a gold coin, in fine a moidore of Portugal; and upon the reverse side, the figure had been rubbed down, and an emblem engraved in its place. There was a figure of Liberty gazing at a rising sun, her foot upon a prostrate dead body, and underneath the words, ‘I strike.’ Over the rising sun, in tiny letters, was the device, ‘In Freedom’s name;’ and at the top, two letters in a monogram. The seated figure noted these things, but, from the expression on her face, they represented nothing to her. Behind the shadow of the tree, the watcher crept closer and closer, trying in vain to get a glimpse of the golden coin. As the seated figure bent over it, tears began to gather in her eyes, overflowing at last, and the passion of sorrow seemed to rise, till her frame was shaken with the sobs she did not strive to master. The woman looking on stepped out from her shelter and crossed the open grass to the other’s side. Her face, on the contrary, was eager, almost hopeful, as she bent forward and touched the weeper on the shoulder. She looked up, surprise mastering her grief for a brief moment.