“What for? And--why, it’s a woman!” said Lord Erceldonne, with unkind enjoyment. A squint-eyed, frowsy lamplighter with a romance was too delightful. “It’s a lady, if you ask me,” retorted the man, with some dignity. “And I think she’s over near to dying for laughter.” “What d’ye mean?” cried Lord Erceldonne, enraged at the just rebuke. Ebenezer told him. But it was too dark for him to see how Lord Erceldonne’s hand flew to his pocket where two letters lay. “Put her down,” he ordered. “Let me look at her.” Ebenezer obeyed, with some relief. Straight and tall, her long limbs as nerveless as if she were dead, the girl lay on the ground. Her white face showed gaunt with famine in the moonlight as her matted, wild hair lifted in the night wind. For a moment both men thought her dead. Erceldonne knelt down by her. “Did she tell you her name?” His voice was thick. “Not she!” “Then she’ll never tell it now--she’s dead!” There was something so like recognition, exultation, in the pitiless words that Davids looked angrily at the speaker. Then he started. The pale, worn face bent over the girl was hers almost line for line; allowing for the difference between sixteen years and fifty. “My soul!” thought the lamplighter. “She is the very spit and image of his lordship.” He turned almost fiercely on the man, as if he had been his equal. “She ain’t dead, and she ain’t going to die, while I can help it. Move, my lord--and let me carry her to the workhouse while there’s time.” A stranger look than ever was on Erceldonne’s face. This was fate--but he had conquered fate before. He burst into a cackling laugh that made Davids jump; long and loud he laughed in the light of the moon over the girl who lay dying on the ground. “Get on with you, then, to the workhouse!” he cried indifferently, but as he turned away his eyes were still full of laughter, in strange contrast to his savage temper when he met Ebenezer. “I mark the king, it seems!” said Lord Erceldonne to the desolate night. “I mark the king, after all!” CHAPTER VII. FIRST BLOOD TO ERCELDONNE. Mother Felicitas sat in her white-walled parlor, and her lean face looked gray against the whitewashed background from which the pictured saints and martyrs looked down indifferent-eyed. Opposite her sat her man of business--for even convents have such things--and his matter-of-fact manner was driving her mad. “You traced that misguided child,” she said smoothly, “to Blackpool, I think you said.” She could hardly sit still in her chair. “Easily. And then to St. Anne’s. But I regret to say I was too late. She had been hiding on an old wreck there starving, for nearly a fortnight, till a lamplighter found her and took her to the workhouse. I went there, of course, but the matron, a civil-spoken woman, told me the girl had been taken away only that morning by a Mrs. Fuller, who wished to adopt her.”