“Too late!” he cried. “O Heaven! to think my own eyes should be the witness of my own eternal shame and--hers!” His head fell on his arms. He was as one dazed and stunned by the consciousness of misery undreamt of, despite those cold and silent years. Moment after moment passed. One hour and then another dropped into the gulf of time that is no more. Still he never stirred. Consciousness of anything besides his own misery--besides the living recognition of his own shame--was dead within him; dead as youth was dead, and hope, and truth, and all things fair and sweet in life--slain by a woman’s hand. * * * * * The dawn was brightening into daylight as at last Lord Francis roused himself from his long stupor. “What had happened?” he thought confusedly. “Had he been ill? Had he done anything?” A hideous dread seized and appalled him. In those brief hours he seemed to have lived a lifetime. “Why did I not kill him?” he muttered, lifting his haggard young face up to the faint rose light that filtered through the curtains. “Kill him! aye, and in her arms--kill him and her too! Heaven!” a strange, hoarse laugh escaped him. “I shall go mad if I stay here--under the same roof with them.” He began to move about confusedly, putting things together, and tossing his clothes into his portmanteau. He was possessed but by one idea--to leave a place made hateful by this discovery, to get away from these men and women, with their jeering tongues and malicious smiles, who all guessed or knew of his disgrace. It had been so public, so shameless. She had summoned this man to her side. She had flaunted her preference for him before his very face, and now---- He cursed her in his heart, as still, with fevered haste and strange, impetuous movements, he gathered together his few possessions. Then he locked his box and wrote a hurried note to the manager of the hotel, inclosing a check and stating that the portmanteau would be sent for later on. A hurried glance around--a glance which passed over the letter he had written but a few brief hours before. It lay where it had fallen from his hand when he sank into the chair by his writing-table--lay there so innocent, yet so fraught with power to work remorse or retribution in days that were to come. The gray light of the early dawn gleamed like a pale phosphorescence over the shadowy corridor, and lit with spectral mystery the white statue and the dusky palms. He shuddered as his eyes fell on them. How significant they had become. Then, with a smothered oath that breathed vengeance for the future, he rushed down the staircase and past the sleeping porter in the entrance hall, and in another moment was standing in the fresh, sweet atmosphere of life and light that God and Nature have so freely given to the thankless, sated eyes of men. * * * * *