works whose purport most resembled that of the mystic lessons she so deeply prized; and words, on which in life she had especially dwelt, seemed now to be whispered in my ear or my heart by the voice which with bodily sense I could never hear again:—­ “Vengeance is Mine; I will repay.”  The absolute control of my will and conscience, won by her perfect purity and unfailing rectitude, outlasted Eveena’s life.  Turning to her murderer—­

“You shall die,” I said, “but you shall die not by revenge but by the law; and not by your own law, but by that which, forbidding that torture shall add to the sting of death, commands that ’Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.’  Yet I cannot give you a soldier’s death,” as my men levelled their weapons.  Cutting the cord that bound him, and grasping him from behind, I flung the wretch forth from the summit far into the air; well assured that he would never feel the blow that would dismiss his soul to its last account, before that Tribunal to whose judgment his victim had appealed.  Then I entered the vessel, waved my hand in farewell to my comrades, and, putting the machinery in action, rose from the surface and prepared to quit a world which now held nothing that could detain or recal me.

CHAPTER XXX — FAREWELL!

My task was not quite done.  It was well for me in the first moments of this new solitude, of this maddening agony, that there was instant work imperatively demanding the attention of the mind as well as the exercise of the body.  I had first, by means of the air pump, to fill the vessel with an atmosphere as dense as that in which I had been born and lived so long; then to close the entrance window and seal it hermetically, and then to arrange the steering gear.  To complete the first task more easily, I arrested the motion of the vessel till she rose only a few feet per minute.  Whilst employed on the air pump, I became suddenly aware, by that instinct by which most men have been at one time or another warned of the unexpected proximity of friend or foe, that I was not alone.  Turning and looking in the direction of the entrance, I saw, or thought I saw, once more the Presence beheld in the Hall of the Zinta.  But commanding, enthralling as were those eyes, they could not now retain my attention; for beside that figure appeared one whose presence in life or death left me no thought for aught beside.  I sprang forward, seemed to touch her hand, to clasp her form, to reach the lips I bent my head to meet:—­and then, in the midst of the bright sunlight, a momentary darkness veiled all from my eyes.  Lifting my head, however, my glance fell, through the window to which the Vision had drawn me, directly upon Ecasfe and upon the home from which I had taken her whose remains were now being carried back thither.  Snatching up my field-glass, I scanned the scene of which I had thus caught a momentary and confused glimpse.