The men swore a little, then went back to investigate the casks of wine. With what happened in the cellar after that this chronicle hath no concern, but those soldiers who remained up in the tap-room had a curious experience which their fuddled brains did not at first take in altogether. What happened was this: the door which gave on the passage was opened, and a man appeared under the lintel. He was dressed in sombre, tight-fitting doublet and hose, with high boots reaching well above his knees; he had a hood over his head and a mask on his face. The soldiers stared at him with wide-open, somewhat dimmed eyes. The masked man only spoke a few words: "Tell your provost," he said, "that señor captain don Ramon de Linea lies dead in the room yonder." Then he disappeared, as quietly as he had come. CHAPTER V VENGEANCE I "Satan! Satan! Assassin!" Donna Lenora had stood beside the dead body of her lover and kinsman wide-eyed and pale with rigid, set mouth and trembling knees while her father explained to her how don Ramon de Linea had been murdered in the tavern of the "Three Weavers" by an unknown man who wore a leather mask. She had listened to the whole garbled version of the sordid affair, never thinking to doubt a single one of her father’s words: don Ramon de Linea, according to the account given to his daughter by Juan de Vargas, had--while in the execution of his duty--been attacked in a dark passage by a mysterious assassin, who had fled directly his nefarious work had been accomplished. The murderer, however, was seen by the provost in command and by two of the soldiers, and was accurately described by them as wearing doublet and high-boots of a dark-brown colour, a hood over his head and a mask of untanned leather on his face. The man had rapidly disappeared in the darkness, evading all pursuit. And donna Lenora--thus face to face for the first time in her sheltered life with crime, with horror and with grief--had, in the first moment of despairing misery, not even a prayer to God in her heart, for it was filled with bitter thoughts of resentment and of possible revenge. She had loved her cousin don Ramon de Linea with all the ardour of her youth, of her warm temperament and of a heart thirsting for the self-sacrifice which women were so ready to offer these days on the altar of their Love. She had never thought him shallow or cruel: to her he had always been just the playmate of childhood’s days, the handsome, masterful boy whom she had looked up to as the embodiment of all that was strong and noble and chivalrous, the first man who had ever whispered the magic word "love" in her ear.