“If you want blood,” he said sternly, “take mine.”

“You fire first,” exclaimed Flamin.

Victor lifted his pistol up into the air and shot at the top of a tree; then he stood calm and silent waiting for Flamin to fire.  His old friend pointed the pistol straight at his heart, but hesitated; and Clotilda recovered her senses and staggered to her feet, and threw herself before her lover.  Flamin looked at them in gloomy wonder without lowering his pistol.  He would have liked to kill them both with one shot, but the instinct of a life-long friendship unnerved him.  He hurled his pistol away, saying, “It isn’t worth troubling to kill a scoundrel like you,” and then turned and strode fiercely through the forest.

* * * * *

Some weeks afterwards Victor was standing on the watch-tower at St. Luna alone, with a letter from Lord Horion in his hand.  He looked down from the height, and he was tempted to throw himself over.  He had regained the friendship of Flamin, but it seemed to him that he had now lost all hope of winning Clotilda.  For Lord Horion had explained the whole of the strange, tortuous policy which he had used in regard to Prince January.  He informed Victor that he had introduced Flamin to the prince, and had proved to him that the young man was his heir.  “They asked me, my dear Victor,” Horion went on to say in his letter, “a question which I was surprised at your not asking.  If Flamin is the son of the prince, where is the son of Chaplain Eymann whom I took to London to be educated with him?  My dear boy, I have no son, and you really are the child of Eymann and his good wife.  This secret I felt bound to reveal to the prince at the same time that I was forced to reveal the secret of Flamin’s birth.  It was because I wished to postpone the revelations until you were established in the prince’s good graces that I made you take the oath that you took so unwillingly.”

Victor felt that what the heir to a great English nobleman might aspire to, the son of a poor country clergyman could never hope to attain.  By a strange vicissitude of fortune he now found himself in the same position as that in which Flamin had been when they met on the watch-tower after their long separation.  His mournful meditations were suddenly interrupted by two figures who had silently crept up the stairs of the tower.  They were Flamin and Clotilda, and each of them put an arm around Victor and led him to the parsonage.  On the way he learnt that Clotilda had known all along that he was the son of Chaplain Eymann.

* * * * *

Titan