“No good to yourself,” rejoined the other; and he wrenched the broken blade from the poor boy’s nerveless hand, and flung it overboard. “Oh! why did you take it from me?” cried Walter. “It was cruel!—I needed it.” And leaning over his oar, he gave way to a passionate fit of weeping. Since he came on board the galley, he had not shed a tear. Nor could he have told any one why he wept now. He would have said, if asked, that his tears were for the lost fragment of steel, for which he felt an unreasoning, childish regret. The weather-beaten slave beside him laid a fettered, bony hand on his. The gesture was friendly, but friendly gestures were so strange to Walter now, that he started and sobbed in his alarm, “Do not betray me.” “God forbid!” replied the other. “I have not spent fifteen years at the oar for nothing. Do not weep, camerado. Pray God to forgive your sin, and go to sleep.” “I cannot sleep,” Walter answered. “Would to God I could die!” “When your time comes, He will call you. Perhaps to-night. The more need you should ask His forgiveness.” Walter feared to be drawn into any talk about religion, lest he should implicate himself by some unguarded word, and fall again into the cruel hands of the Inquisition. So he only said, rather sullenly, “I am an Englishman.” “Englishmen pray to God, and He hears them. I once saw two Englishmen die, and I am very sure God was with them.” “Where was that?” asked Walter, with some faint stirrings of curiosity, and a strange feeling, half pleasure half pain, at the mention of his countrymen. “At a great auto-da-fé. They were burned alive—” “Hush!” Walter interrupted with a shudder. “Don’t talk of that.” “Not if it troubles you, señor.” This fellow-slave of Walter’s knew him to be a gentleman, and addressed him as such; an attention not without its effect on the mind of the unhappy youth. “Yet that was no worse than this,” he added,—“not so bad, as I think sometimes. I was very near proving it too.” “Why, what have you done?”—Walter had often heard the other slaves talk carelessly, and even boastfully, of their crimes; but he never knew this man to make the slightest allusion to his past history. “I was thought to have done something which had almost lit the pile for me. I might have shared the fate of those two Englishmen—well if I had shared their hope.” “Are you not afraid to talk thus?” Walter asked. “Is it not dangerous?” “You speak of danger!—you, who tried just now to kill yourself! Had you succeeded, where would you be?” “At least not in the Inquisition,” was Walter’s murmured answer. “O camerado! don’t you know that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God?”