He looked down at her for a moment, all his soul speaking in his white, working face, then he raised her and gently led her to a door leading to one of the staircases, and held back the curtain that she might pass through.
"Good-bye!" he said. "Do not be afraid that—that I shall torture you with my presence. You spoke of leaving the villa. Do not. I ask that much of you. Grant it to me."
With bowed head, Margaret passed through, and, letting the curtain fall, he stood for awhile like one of the statues surrounding him; then, with a gesture terrible in its intensity, he raised one hand toward heaven, and vowed that he would know no rest till he had avenged her.
And so sprung into existence a foe to Blair more deadly than he had ever known, a foe spurred, not by personal hate, but by the passionate desire to wreak vengeance on behalf of the woman of whose love he had been robbed, whose life this unknown man had stained with shame.
And on that day, miles away, at Leyton Court, lay the great Earl of Ferrers—dying.
"What is the use of being a king if one must die?" exclaimed the Emperor Nero, who had caused death to others too often not to know what it meant.
The great earl, with half a dozen titles to his name, and half a county owning his sway, lay upon a couch in his sitting-room, upon which flickered the rays of the setting sun, fitly typifying his own approaching withdrawal beneath the horizon of life.
At his side sat Violet Graham, who had been sent for in haste some few days back, and who had remained in close attention upon the old man.
Near as he was to that grim door through which all mortality passes never to return, the earl still bore himself as a patrician should. The face was drawn and lined, the white hands were gray and transparent, but the eyes still shone calmly and resolutely.