"You believe me already at your heart," answered the gipsy; "but the other proof is this:--I have said that the murderer gazed for a moment after his victim, and that I saw that he gazed in deep and terrible remorse. Know you how I saw that it was so? Thus: The moment that the shot was fired, and that his brother was falling, his hand let the pistol drop from his grasp, and he sat on his horse motionless as a statue, as if the deed he had done had turned him into stone; nor did he move hand or limb till he turned and galloped away as if the fiends of hell were pursuing him. The pistol was not lost any more than the letter; and happy for him was it that they both fell into the hands of one who concealed them carefully; for had they been found by any other, your father might have ended his days upon a scaffold more than twenty years ago. You ask for more proof. Look there! that is the weapon, and you know the arms of a younger brother of your race too well to doubt me longer." De Vaux took the pistol which the gipsy produced. It was curiously inlaid with silver, and the arms of his family embossed upon the stock. He had once seen one, and only one, precisely similar in the hands of his father, when he came upon him by accident in his private study. His father had put it away in haste into a chest that contained it; and, with a pale cheek and quivering lip, had reproved his son for breaking in upon his privacy. De Vaux now saw the fellow-weapon of the one he had then beheld: the last faint gleam of hope left his heart for ever; and striking his hand upon his bosom, and groaning in the bitterness of his heart, he cast himself frantically down upon the cold ground. CHAPTER XIII. It is a wonder that man ever smiles; for there is something so strange and awful in the hourly uncertainty of our fate--in the atmosphere of darkness and insecurity that surrounds our existence--in the troops of dangers to our peace and to our being that ride invisible upon every moment as it flies--that man is, as it were, like a blind man in the front of a great battle, where his hopes and his joys are being swept down on every side, and in which his own existence must terminate at length, in some undefined hour, and some unknown manner--and yet he smiles as if he were at a pageant! Were his smile the smile of faith and confidence in the great, good Being who sees the struggle and prepares the reward, he might smile unshaken indeed; but, alas, alas! is it so? I fear but seldom.