"If you put it in that way, I fear I don't." "Do you know anybody who does?" After a moment's reflection I was again compelled to answer in the negative. I could not call to mind a single individual of my acquaintance who acted on the principle of returning good for evil. "Well, then, if I am no better than other people, I am no worse. Yet, after all, I think I did well to let him go. Had I killed the brigand, there would have been a coroner's inquest, and questions asked which might have been troublesome to answer, and he has brothers and cousins. If I could destroy the entire brood! Did you see the look he gave me as he went away? It meant murder. We have not seen the last of Giuseppe Griscelli, Mr. Bacon." "I am afraid we have not. I never saw such an expression of intense hatred in my life! Has he cause for it?" "I dare say he thinks so. I killed his father and his grand-father." This, uttered as indifferently as if it were a question of killing hares and foxes, was more than I could stand. I am not strait-laced, but I draw the line at murder. "You did what?" I exclaimed, as, horror-struck and indignant, I stopped in the path and looked him full in the face. I thought I had never seen him so Mephistopheles-like. A sinister smile parted his lips, showing his small white teeth gleaming under his gray mustache, and he regarded me with a look of cynical amusement, in which there was perhaps a slight touch of contempt. "You are a young man, Mr. Bacon," he observed, gently, "and, like most young men, and a great many old men, you make false deductions. Killing is not always murder. If it were, we should consign our conquerors to everlasting infamy, instead of crowning them with laurels and erecting statues to their memory. I am no murderer, Mr. Bacon. At the same time I do not cherish illusions. Unpremeditated murder is by no means the worst of crimes. Taking a life is only anticipating the inevitable; and of all murderers, Nature is the greatest and the cruellest. I have--if I could only tell you--make you see what I have seen--Even now, O God! though half a century has run its course--" Here Mr. Fortescue's voice failed him; he turned deadly pale, and his countenance took an expression of the keenest anguish. But the signs of emotion passed away as quickly as they had appeared. Another moment and he had fully regained his composure, and he added, in his usual self-possessed manner: "All this must seem very strange to you, Mr. Bacon. I suppose you consider me somewhat of a mystery." "Not somewhat, but very much." Mr. Fortescue smiled (he never laughed) and reflected a moment. "I am thinking," he said, "how strangely things come about, and, so to speak, hang together. The greatest of all mysteries is fate. If that horse had not run away with you, these rascals would almost certainly have made away with me; and the incident of to-day is one of the consequences of that which I mentioned at our first interview."