with those tender hands had been snapped by his own reckless touch, and love, life, and hope,—that purer life and hope of which he had vaguely dreamt,—were quenched in the utter gloom of death and sin. With a groan his eyelids flickered and unclosed, staring out into the whirling darkness. But even as life seemed rushing from him in a mad agony of mind and body, a hand was laid on his, and a face bent close to his twisted, death-distorted one. Was it the face of an angel come to taunt him in those last moments with a glance into the Paradise he had lost? Somewhere near he fancied he heard a low, monotonous voice chanting prayers, but the words were lost in the tumultuous surgings of his brain. Then suddenly mental vision and recollection became clear, with that strange, unearthly clearness which comes to the dying, and reveals past and present in the intense, mysterious light of summer moonlight. He remembered all, realizing that he lay a-dying in the great hall of the Château de Mereac. He realized that he was stretched on a low couch close to the blaze of the fire, although the heat failed to warm the chill of his body; as in a dream he saw Pierre the fool crouched at his feet, sobbing as if in pain, as he knelt there. He had often wondered what had made this strange, uncanny lad evince such affection to him; he wondered vaguely now as his languid eyes gazed into the wizened face of the ape, perched on the boy’s shoulder. Then he became aware that there were other figures around him; that close by, gazing down at him in awed and pitying silence, were his sister and Yvon de Mereac—Yvon de Mereac, the man whose life he had so often and so vainly sought. He tried to wonder why he had sought it, tried to wonder why he looked at him so curiously,—was he spirit, or flesh and blood? He had heard that Yvon was dead, but that had been a lie—his own lie, perchance; but he was not dead, although he stood there so gaunt, so pale, so reproachful; he was alive, and it was he himself who was to die—not Yvon de Mereac. The chanting voice of the priest was clearer now—were those the prayers for the dying he was saying? What mockery it was!—prayers for a lost soul—lost beyond redemption! Then the hand that held his closed again over his cold fingers in a warm, strong clasp. Whose was it? Once again his eyes fell on that other face which had floated before his half-conscious gaze. "Gabrielle!" It was a cry of anguish, of pleading, of despair, though it rose little above a whisper. But she understood, for there is a language of the soul which but one other pair of eyes beside our own can read. "Guillaume!" she said, and the soft utterance of his name seemed to stir within him that which he had thought already dead. "I love thee," said the eyes that looked into his. "Yes, I know all, poor, broken, sin-stained soul, and yet I love thee—for love is of God and changeth never."