Betty knelt pitifully beside the sufferer. Her breath was like balm on his poor battered face. His eyes turned to her with a pathetic gratitude that was moving in the extreme. They heard him murmuring to her, thickly and brokenly. “She hath been an angel to his torments,” whispered Sir David. “All the long night she hath never ceased to care for him, and he follows her with his eyes till the tears of both make a veil between. She can read his least desire, as----” Betty turned her head and looked up. “He is speaking. He wants you to listen.” Both men stooped to catch the muttered words. “It is found. I knew before you spoke. I knew its discovery at the last would find me here--here, on the ground. The curse of the predestined is unfulfilment. Let me look at the wicked talisman that is soaked in the blood of martyrs. Let me look, I say.” Tuke leaned over and placed the infernal pebble, splotched and overlaid as he had recovered it, in the groping hand. The fingers closed convulsively on it. The eyes of the dying were fixed questioning. “You would have me say how it came to light?” He--all the watchers, looked round with a start. Against the further wall a deathly shape was risen upon its elbow--Brander, gasping and shaking and holding his hand to his wounded chest. He nodded frantically, as if he would say, “Go on!” “It had fallen out, to the bottom of the bag in which the skull was placed for removal. This bag the girl Darda had used, it seems, for transporting her relics to the lodge. The rogues found it there and collected fire-wood in it. Darda, when she escaped, must have pulled out the sticks, returned her treasures to the bag, and brought all home with her. Still those possessions in her poor life that represented most to her, she must carry them with her when she leapt from the parapet; and to me this moment the bag was brought packed as she had left it. Through all this lust of violence and misery the stone hath remained unguessed at where it dropped from the socket of the skull; and, while the scoundrels yonder were gnashing and whetting their teeth, there it lay in their midst, within reach of all, and not a man might buy himself with the knowledge an hour’s surcease of the hell to which he was condemned.” He turned--he could not help it--with an air of irrepressible triumph to the wounded wretch away from him. A fierce mockery of the creature’s impotent malice was on his lips, but nobility prevailed and he forbore to express it. For a moment Brander stared at him as if he would have bartered his last chance of life for a loaded pistol in his hand; then, with a rending groan, he went flat upon his straw pillow and turned his face to the wall. A silence of some minutes succeeded, while the dying man twisted the shapeless lump feebly in his fingers. Then, all at once he was speaking again, and his voice gathered strength over the painful syllables.