CHAPTER XII.

LEX TALIONIS.

AND Juliet never pardoned Edmond.

Love, perhaps, may survive Esteem, for the cause of love is in itself. It is, and knows not why. But Juliet had not loved Edmond; she had worshiped him. He had committed sacrilege against himself. The God we have knelt to can never kneel to us with impunity. The weakest woman is pitiless to weakness in a man, and the gentlest of a gentle sex has no mitigation of scorn for the man that has betrayed the gentlest quality of her nature-implicit trust.

There is no pardon for desecrated ideals.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE LAST TRIBUNAL.

I HAD ceased reading. I had ended the perusal of the count's papers. The night was far spent. The hours passed unnoticed. The pages still lay in my hand. The knowledge of their story still weighed heavy on my mind.

Horror and compassion contended within me, disputing in my thoughts the sentence of a human soul, as though it were the Judgment Hour.

"No!" I cried at last.

"No pity for the pitiless! No mercy for the unmerciful!"

When the assassin turns the knife in the breast of his victim in the moment when spume is on the lips, and blood is in the eyes of the dying man, he acts perhaps with pity, willing to bring to speedier end those lingering pangs.

The man who first devised the diabolical machinery of torture, and took fierce pleasure gloating on the shrieks of some tormented wretch, sought thus perhaps to slake the thirst of a burning vengeance, or else he was a savage, born with the natural wildness of an untamed brute, and used to bloody business. But this man?

By so much the more nobly natured, the more deeply damned; for in him, all large and lofty powers,

combined, augmented the greatness of his crime by the sum of his virtues.

Ah! didst thou think to find an error in the calculation of Eternal Justice?

Bungler!

Ah! didst thou dream that good undone was no great evil done? That no misdeed was in thy good deed missed?

Fool!

Fool, to forget that Will can only be annihilated by Will; that good unwilled is evil willed. Triple fool and slave, that didst sell thyself to Time and Chance, yet couldst not win the wages of an hour!

Knewest thou not that a moment is master of a life? for it is but for a moment that the materials of a man catch fire, burn up, and show what he is made of. Nay, life's self is nothing more than so much stuff to feed that moment's fire.

The Recording Angel is no scribe. He does but keep the registers we write ourselves, and the hand that signs the Judgment Record is man's own. Pardon?

Yes, for another. For any other, yes.

For this man, none.

So I spake in counsel with myself, and ended stern upon the law.

Then a soft hand pressed back my brow, a loving arm was wound about my neck, and a dear and wellknown voice said to me in a tone of tender reproach,

"Dear heart, again you have passed a whole night long unsleeping; and yet how often have you said, yourself, that the night is no man's friend!"

"An angel has spoken out," I cried, with a touch of self-accusal, as I pressed my wife to my arms.

No, night is not the friend of man. And the inhumanities which night had whispered began to be silenced in my heart as I watched, enlarging on the pallid pane, the light that comes to all when "He maketh his sun to rise upon the unjust and the just.' "Put the horses to at once," I said to the servant, who was half asleep when he answered my bell.

"Dear, you are going out, and yet the day has hardly risen. Let the sleepers sleep, and take, thyself, the rest thou needest."

"No," I said; "from him I seek, rest has long since fled. But I go to bring it back to him, else I am not worthy to call myself a Physician."

And I went.

How describe to you my meeting with that unhappy man? I was unable to utter a word. But I opened my arms wide, wide, and he fell upon my breast.

So leaned he, and so wept he, long-bitterly, bitterly weeping. A poor broken ruin of a man.

But when the hard and indurated anguish of long years began to melt in showers of hot tears, there burst with a convulsive sob from the long-pent, hopeless yearning of a wretched human heart this single indescribably sorrowful word,

"At last!"

Long in my arms he lay. It was a long muchneeded luxury of deep-desired relief. Into the hollow places of his heart trickled the kind refreshment -the blessed dews of human pity, and once again he

felt his long-lost brotherhood with man in the deep compassion of a fellow-creature.

At last!

Yes," I said, "at last, poor spirit! for lasting is no human sorrow; and eternal only, and without limit, is the love of the Great Father of us all, who has a pity for each human pang, a pardon for each penitent soul."

The days that followed this had silent voices. Let mine be silent too. I will not babble the daily diag nosis of that weary spirit's slow successive fadings from the verge of a life long forfeit to the grave, nor of the brightening, beautifying ardors of it toward the sunrise slowly seen in the hope of a life redeemed.

At last it came-the year's last hour and his life's. The year was in its end; the world was in its winter; the night was spent beyond the middle hour. Dark and drear, with gusty footsteps on the slumbrous snow, the Old Year went, the New Year came.

In the night of St. Sylvester, the night that melted in the sunrise of the Year 1842, I sat by the deathbed of Count Edmond R

All the secret folds of that nature native to nobility, which, exhausting itself in the life-long struggle with a guilty memory, had tended ever backward and upward to its original beauty (for that man's penitence on earth had been excruciating), one by one unveiled themselves to me in the hour when I received his last confession.

And as the pain which he had long repressed melted in softened words from the lips of the dying man, the force of self-retention which had so obstinately fastened him to life gave way, and the shattered body