Whatever suffering meets the sight, it does not so exquisitely affect the brain as that which reaches it through the ear. At the former the heart may bleed and turn sick; but at the latter the brain seems, for the moment, wrought into frenzy; and, even though personally in safety, it is scarcely possible to restrain the same sounds from bursting forth. How then must those shrill sounds of human agony have fallen on the hapless Marie, recognizing as she did with the rapidity of thought, in the awful scene around her, the main hall of that mysterious and terrible tribunal, whose existence from her earliest infancy had been impressed upon her mind, as a double incentive to guard the secret of her faith; that very Inquisition, from which her own grandfather, Julien Heuriquez, had fled, and in which the less fortunate grandfather of her slaughtered husband, had been tortured and burnt. For a second she stood mute and motionless, as turned to stone; then, pressing both hands tightly on her temples, she sunk down at the feet of her conductor, and sought in words to beseech his mercy; but her white lips gave vent to no sound save a shriek, so wild that it seemed, for the moment, to drown all other sorrows, and startle even the human fiends around her. Her conductor himself started back; but quickly recovering-- "Fool!" he muttered, as he rudely raised her. "I have no power to aid thee; come before the Superior--we must all obey--ask him, implore him, for mercy, not me." He bore her roughly to a recess, divided off at the upper end of the hall, by a thick black drapery, in which sat the Grand Inquisitor and his two colleagues. One or two familiars were behind them, and a secretary sat near a table covered with black cloth, and on which were several writing implements. All wore masks of black crape, so thick that not a feature could be discerned with sufficient clearness for recognition elsewhere; yet, one glance on the stern, motionless figure, designated as the Grand Inquisitor, sufficed to bid every drop of blood recede from the prisoner's heart with human terror, at the very same moment that it endowed the _woman_ with such supernatural fortitude that her very form seemed to dilate, and her large eye and lovely mouth expressed--if it could be, in such a scene and such an hour--unutterable scorn. Antipathy, even as love, will pierce disguise; and that one glance, lit up with almost bewildering light, in the prisoner's mind, link after link of what had before been impenetrable mystery. Her husband's discovery of her former love for Arthur; his murder; the suspicion thrown on Stanley; her own summons as witness against him; her present danger; all, all were traced to one individual, one still working and most guilty passion, which she, in her gentle purity and holy strength, had scorned. She could not be deceived--the mystery that surrounded him was solved--antipathy explained; and Marie's earthly fate lay in Don Luis Garcia's hands!