He sat and looked at her, lost in wonder.

“You do not speak—­you sit and stare as though you could not believe your eyes or ears.  It is hard to believe, I know—­the humble, the meek Sybilla metamorphosed thus.  But the Sybilla Silver you knew was a delusion.  Behold the real one, for the first time in your life!”

“Woman, who are you?  What are you?”

“I am the granddaughter of Zenith the gypsy, the woman your father wronged to the death, and your bitterest enemy, Sir Everard Kingsland!”

“The granddaughter of Zenith the gypsy?” he repeated.  “Then Sybilla Silver is not your name?”

“The name is as false as the character in which she showed herself—­that of your friend.”

“And yet, the first time we met you saved my life.”

“No thanks for that.  I did not know you, though if I had I would have saved it, all the same.  That was not the death you were to die.  I saved you for the gallows.”

“Sybilla, Sybilla!”

“I saved you for the gallows!” she repeated.  “I come here to-night to tell you the truth, and you shall hear it.  Did I not swear your life away?  Did I not nurse you back from the jaws of death?  All for what?  That the astrologer’s prediction might be fulfilled—­that the heir of Kingsland Court might die a felon’s death on the scaffold!”

“The astrologer’s prediction?” he cried, catching some of her excitement.  “What do you know about that?”

“Everything—­everything!” she exclaimed, exultingly.  “Far more than you do, for you only know such a thing exists—­you know nothing of its contents.  Oh, no! mamma guarded her darling boy too carefully for that, notwithstanding your dying father’s command.  But in spite of her it has come true.”

“What was the astrologer’s prediction—­that terrible prediction that shortened my father’s life?”

“It was this—­that his only son and heir, born on that night, would die by the hand of the common hangman, a murderer’s death on the scaffold.  Enough to blight any father’s life who believed in it, was it not?”

“It was devilish.  My poor father!  Tell me the name of the fiend incarnate who could do so diabolical a deed, for you know?”

“I do.  That man was my father.”

“Your father?”

“Ay, Achmet the Astrologer.  Ha! ha!  As much an astrologer as you or I. It was his part of our vengeance—­my part was to see it carried out.  I swore, by my dying mother’s bedside, to devote my life to that purpose.  Have I not kept my oath?”

She folded her arms and looked at him with a face of devilish malignity.  He recoiled from her as from a visible demon.

“For God’s sake, go!  You bring a breath of hell into this prison.  Go—­go!  You have done your master’s work.  Leave me!”

“Not yet; you have heard but half the truth.  Oh, potent Prince of Kingsland, hear me out!  You will be hanged tomorrow morning for murdering your wife!  You didn’t murder her, did you?  Who do you suppose did it?”