"Uncle," he pleaded, "not this. Lady Letitia has been kind and gracious to me always. We can't strike through women. I'd rather you bade me take his life." "But I don't bid you do anything of the sort," was the sullen reply. "Death's no punishment to any man, and the like of him's too brave to feel the fear of it. It's through her the blow must come, and you'll do my bidding, David, or you'll see me sitting waiting for you to-morrow, with a last message to you upon my dead lips." David gripped the torch from his hand. After all, Hell might come to any man! "I'll go," he said. It was a nightmare that followed. Stooping only a little, flashing his torch always in front, he half ran, half scrambled along a paved way, between paved walls which even the damp of centuries seemed scarcely to have entered. Soon the path descended steeply and then rose on the other side of the moat. Once a rat paused to look at him with eyes gleaming like diamonds, and bolted at the flash of the torch. More than once he fancied that he heard footsteps echoing behind him. He paused to listen. There was nothing. He lost sense of time or distance. He stole on, dreading the end--and the end came sooner even than he had feared. There was the door that yielded easily to his touch, the steep steps round and round the interior of the tower, the blank wall before him. The iron handle was there. His hands closed upon it. For a moment he stood in terrible silence. This was something worse than death! Then he set his teeth firmly, pressed the handle and stepped through the wall. Afterwards it seemed to him that there must have been something mortally terrifying in his own appearance as he stood there with his back to the wall and his eyes fixed upon the solitary occupant of the room. Lady Letitia, in a blue dressing gown, was lying upon a couch drawn up before a small log fire. There seemed to be no detail of the room which in those sickening moments of mental absorption was not photographed into his memory. The old four-poster bedstead, hung with chintz; the long, black dressing table, once a dresser, covered carelessly with tortoise-shell backed toilet articles, with a large mirror in the centre from which a chair had just been pushed back. But, above all, that look in her face, from which every other expression seemed to have permanently fled. Her lips were parted, her eyes were round with horrified surprise. The book which she had been reading slipped from her fingers and fell noiselessly on to the hearth-rug. She sat up, supporting herself with her hands, one on either side, pressed into the sofa. She seemed denied the power of speech, almost as he was. And then a sudden wonderful change came to him. He spoke quite distinctly, although he kept his voice low.