During the lull, Sir Henry and Mountjoy staggered through the exit, and fell to the ground unconscious, some distance away from the scene, to which they had been lured from their hotel by a wily denizen of the quarter--"to see some fun." As they lay there, safe from further molestation from the satellites of the "casino," for these people did not pursue their victims beyond their own portals, a lithe figure crept stealthily up to them. It was Thomas Tempest, the father of Gilda, the man who had skirmished safely in the rear during the fierce fight. Bending over Sir Henry, he felt in his pockets and extracted the talisman of the goddess Isis. He would have taken more, but footsteps on the plank walk scared him, and he faded away into the darkness. The man with the weird eyes, whom Sir Henry had knocked senseless, was Doctor Malsano, then in early middle age. The gipsy girl was his daughter, and the gipsy woman was his wife. Gilda Tempest had no relationship to him. Her father, Thomas Tempest, had fallen low in the social scale, and was entirely under the influence and control of Malsano, who utilised his services for his own ends and profit. He proved to be the means of carrying out the first portion of the vendetta, by shooting Sir Henry at the time of the burglary at Aldborough Park. The bitterness of the feud was increased by the youthful folly of Sir Henry, who, in a spirit of devilment, and with the aid of a native, succeeded in meeting the gipsy girl again. The gipsy mother discovered them, and there was a frenzied scene of rage, the woman cursing the young man with all the fierceness of her race. Sir Henry treated the matter lightly, until, years afterwards, he was made aware of the fact that the incident had not closed, and that vengeance was on his track. The woman, on her death-bed, had extracted a willing vow from her husband, Malsano, that he would continue the vendetta to the bitter end. The tortuous workings of the mind of this abnormal man led him to carry out his purpose in his own strange way. In his fiendish efforts, he had dragged down a girl, Gilda Tempest, the daughter of another victim of his criminal nature. Noble by nature, and beautiful by disposition, this handsome young woman was doomed to a life of degradation and crime. Her last act was to sacrifice her life for the man she loved with the strange passion of a warm nature. CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT. CONCLUSION.