"They say," repeated the wretched maniac, his eyes glinting about the room in his frenzy, "they say nothing can save me. The priests will have my blood, will have me broken upon the wheel, will even refuse me absolution at the last. Yet I confessed to one of them--I confessed--I should be spared." "What fresh crime have you committed that brings you here?" asked Elphinston sternly of him. "What deed of treachery--or worse?" "I slew him," said Fordingbridge, still shaking all over, "because I hated him, because he wrought my downfall. I came behind him on--on--the _place_, I had the knife up my sleeve thus," and he bent his hand as though to illustrate the holding of a concealed dagger's hilt in it, "and when he turned from me I drove it home. He was dead a moment afterwards. Dead! Dead at my feet!" and he leered hideously as he spoke. "Who was it you assassinated thus, in a manner so well becoming all your actions? Some poor, feeble creature unable to protect himself; some old man or stripling, perhaps, and unarmed?" Was it well that Bertie did not suspect? If he had known, if he could but have known or guessed that, so far from being such as he imagined, the victim had been his own stalwart friend and comrade who had fallen beneath the foul assassin's knife, could he have restrained himself enough not to have dashed his brains out against the prison walls? "Ha! ha!" laughed Fordingbridge, while at the same time there came into his eyes the awful look of cunning so peculiar to maniacs--"ha! ha! I know. But the secret's mine--mine--and the priests'. Yet, though I confided in them--confessed to them--they still denounced me, will now slay me. They say," he went on, putting out a long, shaking finger and endeavouring to touch the arm of the poor old marquis, who shrank back from him as from some foul creature, "they say that not even my English peerage can save me, since the priests are determined to have vengeance. Do you think that is so? Will they kill an English peer?" "There is," said De Chevagny coldly--for now he knew that the creature he had pitied when first he came to this room was a cold-blooded assassin who had probably gone mad from terror afterwards--"there is no reason why they should not. The priests have slain many French peers who were not murderers--Son Eminence Grise more than a hundred, they say. Why should they not slay an English peer who is such as you are?" "But not by the wheel," Fordingbridge moaned, "not by the wheel. Oh, to think of it!" and again he mowed and mouthed as he spoke. "I have seen men killed thus--there was one at--at--I forget the place--my memory is gone--but I saw him. They broke his bones with iron bars, and finished by beating in his chest-bone, and----" breaking off inconsequently, "I want my dinner; I am hungry." In disgust the others turned away from him, while he threw himself on his bed in the corner and moaned again that he was hungry.