The cavalier and his companion were much alarmed by this unexpected occurrence. They doubted not that the foul fiend was before them, bodily, in the form of this poor maniac. After a short interval of silence, he cried, approaching them fiercely-- "Ye have sold me, soul and body, to the wicked one. May curses long and heavy light on ye! The coin! the coin! Oh, that accursed thing! I have bought thy grave, stranger; and my day of hope is past!" The latter part of the speech was uttered in a tone of such deep and heartrending misery that pity arose in place of terror in the bosom of his auditors. Marian ventured to address him, hoping she might assuage or dissipate the fearful hallucination under which he laboured. "There is yet hope for the repenting sinner. The hour of life is the hour of grace: for that, and that only, is life prolonged. Turn to Him from whom thou hast backslidden, nor add unto thy crime by wilfully rejecting the free offers of His mercy." "Mercy!--Life!" Here he laughed outright. "Hearest thou not my tormentor?--Life!--I am dead, wench; and my grave is waiting for me, dug by these accursed fingers. That grave I digged for thee is now mine. Unwittingly have I bought it, and the coin is in thy purse!" It seems the poor maniac, in replacing the mysterious coin to which, from some cause or other, he attached such importance, had unthinkingly added it to the common hoard, and in this manner conveyed it to the stranger, whose grave he persisted he had bought by this transfer; and nothing could shake his belief in so marvellous a conclusion. The cavalier attempted to comfort him; and in order to make the delusion subservient to the removal of its terrors, he offered to restore the coin, or even the whole of what he had received, that the simple gravedigger might be certain he had it in possession. "'Tis needless; the token, once from my grasp and in the fingers of another whose grave I have digged, would never change my doom by its return. Keep what thou hast; and may it serve thee more faithfully than it hath served me! But remember--let me say it while my senses hold together, for I feel the blast coming that shall scatter them to the four winds--remember, if thou part therefrom, as I have done, to some doomed one, thou shalt go to the grave in his stead. But a charmed life is thine as long as it is in thy possession. Away--leave me--the master will be here presently for his own. Leave me, I say; for when the fiend cometh, he'll not tarry. But be sure you make fast the door, lest I escape, and mischief happen, should I get abroad." "Stephen!" said Marian, "slight not the mercy of thy God, nor dishonour His name, by hearkening to the suggestions of the enemy. His arm is not shortened, nor His ear heavy." "I know it; but when the fiend came, and found the house swept and garnished, did he not take unto himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and was not the latter end of that man worse than the first?"