"Weak criminal!" said he, "hear me. You received at my hands forbearance, friendship, fostering and anxious care. When your own follies plunged you into penury, mine was the unseen hand that plucked you from famine, or the prison. I strove to redeem, and save, and raise you, and endow your miserable spirit with the thirst and the power of honour and independence. The agent of that wish was Florence Lascelles; you repaid us well! a base and fraudulent forgery, attaching meanness to me, fraught with agony and death to her. Your conscience at last smote you; you revealed to her your crime--one spark of manhood made you reveal it also to myself. Fresh as I was in that moment from the contemplations of the ruin you had made, I curbed the impulse that would have crushed the life from your bosom. I told you to live on while life was left to her. If she recovered, I could forgive; if she died, I must avenge. We entered into that solemn compact, and in a few hours the bond will need the seal: it is the blood of one of us. Castruccio Cesarini, there is justice in Heaven. Deceive yourself not; you will fall by my hand. When the hour comes, you will hear from me. Let me pass--I have no more now to say." Every syllable of this speech was uttered with that thrilling distinctness which seems as if the depth of the heart spoke in the voice. But Cesarini did not appear to understand its import. He seized Maltravers by the arm, and looked in his face with a wild and menacing glare. "Did you tell me she was dying?" he said. "I ask you that question: why do you not answer me? Oh, by the way, you threaten me with your vengeance. Know you not that I long to meet you front to front, and to the death? Did I not tell you so--did I not try to move your slow blood--to insult you into a conflict in which I should have gloried? Yet then you were marble." "Because /my/ wrong I could forgive, and /hers/--there was then a hope that hers might not need the atonement. Away!" Maltravers shook the hold of the Italian from his arm, and passed on. A wild, sharp yell of despair rang after him, and echoed in his ear as he strode the long, dim, solitary stairs that led to the death-bed of Florence Lascelles. Maltravers entered the room adjoining that which contained the sufferer--the same room, still gay and cheerful, in which had been his first interview with Florence since their reconciliation. Here he found the physician dozing in a /fauteuil/. Lady Florence had fallen asleep during the last two or three hours. Lord Saxingham was in his own apartment, deeply and noisily affected; for it was not thought that Florence could survive the night.