You can feel faint for joy at that passage for a good dozen readings, if you are appreciative. Poor Bessy, faint from wounds and blood-letting, retreats valiantly to a closet window step by step and drops out, leaving Monsereau spitted, like a black spider, dead on the floor. Here hope and expectation are drawn out in your breast like chewing gum stretched to the last shred of tenuation. At this point I firmly believed that Bessy would escape. I feel sorry for the reader who does not. You just naturally argue that the faithful Rely will surely reach him and rub him with the balsam. That balsam of Dumas! The same that D'Artagnan's mother gave him when he rode away on the yellow horse, and which cured so many heroes hurt to the last gasp. That miraculous balsam, which would make doctors and surgeons sing small today if they had not suppressed it from the materia medica. May be they can silence their consciences by the reflection that they suppressed it to enhance the value and necessity of their own personal services. But let them look at the death rate and shudder. I had confidence in Rely and the balsam, but he could not get there in time. Then, it was forgone that Bessy must die. Like Mercutio, he was too brilliant to live. Depend upon it, these wizards of story tellers know when the knell of fate rings much sooner than we halting readers do. Bessy drops from the closet window upon an iron fence that surrounded the park and was impaled upon the dreadful pickets! Even then for another moment you can cherish a hope that he may escape after all. Suspended there and growing weaker, he hears footsteps approaching. Is it a rescuing friend? He calls out--and a dagger stroke from the hand of D'Anjou, his Judas master, finds his heart. That's the way Bessy died. No man is proof against the dagger stroke of treachery. Bessy was powerful and the due jealous. Diana has been carried off safely by the trustworthy St. Luc. She must have died of grief if she had not been kept alive to be the instrument of retributive justice. (In the sequel you will find that this Queen of Hearts descended upon the ignoble due at the proper time like a thousand of brick and took the last trick of justice.) * * * * *