"Angus!" murmured Christabel, piteously, "Angus, can you hear me?--do you know? Oh, my God! is there memory or understanding in the world where he has gone, or is it all a dead blank? Help me, my God! I have lost all the old sweet illusions of faith--I have left off praying, hoping, believing--I have only thought of my dead--thought of death and of him till all the living world grew unreal to me--and God and Heaven were only like old half-forgotten dreams. Angus!" For a long time she lay motionless, her cold hands clasping the cold stone, her lips pressed upon the soft dewy turf, her face buried in primrose leaves--then slowly, and with an effort, she raised herself upon her knees, and knelt with her arms encircling the cross--that sacred emblem which had once meant so much for her: but which, since that long blank interval last winter, seemed to have lost all meaning. One great overwhelming grief had made her a Pagan--thirsting for revenge--vindictive--crafty--stealthy as an American Indian on the trail of his deadly foe--subtle as Greek or Oriental to plan and to achieve a horrible retribution. She looked at the inscription on the cross, legible in the moonlight, deeply cut in large Gothic letters upon the grey stone, filled in with dark crimson. "VENGEANCE IS MINE: I WILL REPAY, SAITH THE LORD." Who had put that inscription upon the cross? It was not there when the monument was first put up. Christabel remembered going with Jessie to see the grave in that dim half-blank time before she went to Switzerland. Then there was nothing but a name and a date. And now, in awful distinctness, there appeared those terrible words--God's own promise of retribution--the claim of the Almighty to be the sole avenger of human wrongs. And she, reared by a religious woman, brought up in the love and fear of God, had ignored that sublime and awful attribute of the Supreme. She had not been content to leave her lover's death to the Great Avenger. She had brooded on his dark fate, until out of the gloom of despair there had arisen the image of a crafty and bloody retribution. "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." So runs the dreadful sentence of an older law. The newer, lovelier law, which began in the after-glow of Philosophy, the dawn of Christianity, bids man leave revenge to God. And she, who had once called herself a Christian, had planned and plotted, making herself the secret avenger of a criminal who had escaped the grip of the law. "Must he lie in his grave, unavenged, until the Day of Judgment?" she asked herself. "God's vengeance is slow." * * * * *