Back through the vague shadowland of unconsciousness, back once more to a still vaguer, more terrible realization of life—life all drawn into one great and hideous contraction of pain, where thoughts became at first impossible, till, the mists clearing aside, recollections of the past claimed fresh tortures of the mind. It was so that Guillaume de Coray crept back once more into conscious existence, to find himself lying on a couch in a chamber of the Château de Mereac. What chamber it was his weary brain refused to realize: all he was aware of was the agony which shot through his body with the first attempt to move. Then swiftly came the unerring intuition that this was death—death, terrible, unrelenting, inexorable, come to claim him all unready, sin-stained, fear-stricken. A shudder passed through the quivering, broken body, which suffered now less than the man’s soul. Clearly they stood out, those sins,—hideous sins, arraigning him before the judgment seat of One Whose Eyes must needs search deep to the heart’s core. Was it all black within?—all black, irredeemable guilt? Far back in the secret chambers of his heart there flickered a feeble light; it was the inner shrine, so long empty, but filled now with the image, not of its Creator, but of His creature. Gabrielle Laurent, the humble peasant-girl of Arteze—it was she who alone had found that sanctuary and filled it so strangely. Cruel, evil, treacherous to all, his love for her had been the one pure spot in a shameless life. For her sake indeed he might have striven to become other than he was, had it not been for the devil-whisper which prompted him to win for her by foul and wicked means what she, had she known, would have shrunk from in horror. So the powers of evil twist us to their will, and Guillaume had plotted with no thought for the undoing of his soul, even whilst he felt stirring within him the birth of a pure love. And now——? Again the shiver ran through him. He had played for a high stake, and he had lost. Death was the penalty. In solitude his lost soul must steal forth to its doom, and even in so going leave behind it a memory of shame which should be read in grief and horror by eyes from which he had striven so carefully to hide so horrible a story. What would she think of him when she knew him for what he was? What would she say when she learnt that her noble lover was but the phantom of her own pure spirit, and that the thing she had loved was that from which all true and upright men and women must turn shuddering away? Even in death the thought tormented him above all bodily sufferings. If only he could have explained,—if only he could have told her that his love at least was true,—if only he could have had time. But it was too late, all too late; never again would he see her as he had seen her that summer morning, innocent and beautiful, sitting there in the sunshine beside her spinning-wheel. The destiny she might have woven for him