"Ralph! Ralph! I am here! Save me! Save me!"
He sprung toward the voice. The movement was fatal.
Ivan Belmont had stolen up softly behind him, bearing a heavy mallet in his hand. A moment more, and it was lifted high in air, and Kathleen's anguished eyes beheld her darling struck down before her into apparent death!
Kathleen would never forget the horror of that moment. It seemed to her that she went mad with grief and terror. Shriek after shriek burst from her lips, and she beat her little hands wildly against the smoky little window-pane, struggling wildly to get free. But the fiends before her did not heed her cries. Between them they lifted the inanimate form of their victim, and bearing it a short distance away, but in full view of the window, they laid it on a plank upon a table in front of the large steel circular saw. Kathleen saw his arms fall limply to his side, and the dark curly head drop back heavily. The death-white face, the closed eyes, assured her that he was either in a deep swoon or already dead from the terrible blow that had felled him to the ground.
Hushing the piercing shrieks upon her blanched lips, Kathleen watched in terrible suspense the movements of the two fiends.
Perhaps they doubted whether their victim was already dead, for they bent over him, feeling his pulse and listening for his heart.
"He lives," Ivan Belmont said, with fiendish joy. "Let us bind him hand and foot, and leave him on the plank till he revives. I want to enjoy his agony when he realizes the awful death that lies before him. He must know that Kathleen is here, that she will witness his death, and then meet the same horrible fate."
It was a scene on which the devils in hell might have gloated: the old mill, with its dim lights and strange, flickering shadows; the prostrate man, with his death-white face; the two fiends binding him with strong cords, lest he should recover and escape their vengeful fury; and looking on with anguished eyes at the doom of her beloved was our beautiful Kathleen.
"He revives!" hissed Fedora.
"Good!" laughed Ivan, hoarsely; and he looked back over his shoulder at Kathleen's convulsed, almost supernaturally pale face at the window.