And the tale itself! Ah! why had the chief actor in it gone so summarily from justice—his justice? Almost he could find it in his heart to quarrel with the faithful hound that had done its work of retribution so swiftly and so well. At first it had been almost impossible to believe that this broken, feeble-minded man with Yvon’s eyes could really be the gallant youth on whom his fond hopes had been set. And then he had heard—yes, heard of the little cellar chamber in the old house at Rennes where his son had awaked from his long unconsciousness and found it so hard to struggle back through the shadowland of delirium into realization of where he was, and in whose keeping. And the realization, too, when it came, how terrible and how bitter! The father, conning over the tale, could well fit in the bare outline of it all, with lurid touches of imagination. As he stared, leaning his elbow on the table before him, with unseeing eyes on the faded tapestries of the wall, he could picture that dark cell, the sick, fevered man, whose youth struggled so madly within him for life; then the mocking, jeering face of his captor as he told him the truth which there was no need to hide—the truth that he was to lie there as this villain’s trump card, the instrument with which he was to work on another’s fears; how indeed that he was to be kept there to pine and languish, but not to die, until his kinsman should enter upon his inheritance, when his captor would be able to use him as a constant menace to the unlawful Sieur de Mereac, wherewith to extort gold and favour for himself. Oh, it was a cunning scheme! and how gleefully the originator of it would have laughed as he unfolded it to his victim! And then the long waiting time, the dragging by of month after month, in which death indeed must have been yearned for as the best good, and yet came not at his call. Then the delirious fancy, born of that terrible captivity, that his gaoler was ever waiting an opportunity to come creeping into his cell with his murderous dagger. And even though he had prayed for death and longed for her restful kiss, yet the terror of this swift and bloody end must have become unendurable. Then, when hope seemed dead, the sudden fresh upleaping of it in the pity and friendship of the old crone who brought him food, and, on rare occasions, fresh garments—the resolve for flight, the breathless excitement of creeping up those long and winding flights of stairs, with the old hag muttering and sobbing out fears that her master would kill her when he heard the truth, then the mad joy of drawing in once more the pure draught of outer air, and finally the ill-timed escape—an escape so nearly successful, however, that he had reached the river side and stood in very view of the château, when the sight of his cruel captor had unbalanced the weak, cowed spirit once more, and he had incontinently fled into the forest, only to be easily overtaken and