Aye! sick unto death, though even the doctor who attended poor stricken Frank would have told you there was hope still. What did the doctor know of the last terrible scene in a life’s tragedy to which his patient had been a helpless witness, before he dragged himself back, quaking with fever and affright, to the cottage wherein he had taken up his temporary abode? What if the love that had linked him for a space with Lucille de Vigny had had little in common with the “holy flame that forever burneth”? What if it had been nothing but the evanescent and unholy outcome of “fantasy’s hot fire”? It had yet left a recollection behind it which rendered it more terrible for him to see her tortured and slain than another and a better woman. That second during which the lunatic’s knife had been pressed against her heart, the second during which she had shrieked aloud to him for help, a hideous, unmelodious shriek, more like a squall of far-gone animalish agony than a woman’s shriek, had utterly unmanned him. He had realized in that short space all the horrors of a Dantesque hell whence rescue is impossible. Yielding to the mad impulse of the moment, he would have flung himself down from the rock, a useless victim, had not the mighty ocean, or possibly some stronger power still, taken the matter into its hands and rendered all intervention useless. Frank was conscious of a loud booming noise accompanied by a mighty swish and whirl of water that seemed to cover the whole tragic scene from his view. The salt spray dashed aloft and closed his smarting eyes. When he opened them again, Lucille and her husband were gone, only a monster wave curling back into the ocean was sounding their dirge. Whether the knife had entered her heart before the sea took her into its merciful embrace, whether in her death struggle she had clutched at her murderer and dragged him down with her to her doom, whether some mighty wave had risen unexpectedly and swept both combatants away at the same instant, could never be known. The ocean seemed to be lashed into a sudden fury. For a moment Frank dimly discerned some object that might have been a woman’s hair floating under the liquid green. But was it Lucille’s hair? For all he knew it might have been only one of those waving tangles of brown seaweed that the mighty Atlantic surges wash into the English Channel. With trembling knees and a reeling brain he staggered away from the scene of the tragedy. It was fully two hours before he succeeded in dragging himself back to the cottage, where he terrified the inmates by the aspect of his drawn white face and hollow eyes. What had become of Lucille’s sobbing child, orphaned, in one short, fateful instant, he could not have told. Tended and put to bed by kindly hands, he lay like the Israelitish king with his face to the wall, in the torpor that followed upon the too great tension he had endured. Even the zest for life seemed to be leaving him. There was