“What interest could she have had in reducing the man to this state of dementia?”

“She had been like a mother to the young man, and had sheltered him in her hut for years, when he had no other home.  She was very much attached to this adopted son of hers; she was longing to go back to her tribe and die among her own people.  It may be that she wished to take him with her, and so gave him the drug that destroyed his will.  Or, she may have been the tool of others.  All this is the merest conjecture.  But the facts remain that she foretold his fate, and that she vanished on the same day on which he disappeared, and that he remained in exile, voluntarily, until he was murdered by the Indians.  Still—­there might have been another cause for this self-expatriation.”

“May I inquire its nature?”

“No, duke; it is only in my secret thought.  I have no just right to speak of it to you.  But if the question be not indiscreet, will you tell me why you take so deep an interest in the unreliable story of this Indian woman’s life?”

“Certainly; because the wild young blade who married and left her, and paid down his life for that desertion, was my own uncle, my father’s elder brother, Earl Netherby, the heir to the dukedom, by whose death my father, and subsequently myself, succeeded to the title.”

“You astonish me!  Are you sure of this?”

“Reasonably sure.  I was but five years old when my uncle came to bid us good-by, before setting out for America.  But I remember his having on his finger a wonderful ring, a large solitaire diamond with certain flaws in it; but these flaws were very curious; they were faint traces left by the hand of nature shaping out a human eye.  When ordinary mortals like myself looked at the diamond, they saw the delicate outline of an eye traced by the flaws in the stone; but it was said that whenever a clairvoyant looked into it they could see, not the human eye, but, as through a telescope, they could view the panorama of future events.”

“What nonsense!” said Mr. Rockharrt.

“Nonsense, of course,” assented the duke.  “I did not speak of the ring on account of its supposed magic power, but because it was so peculiar a jewel that it would be impossible to mistake it for any other ring, or any other ring for itself; and to lead up to the statement that its discovery enabled me to identify the Mexican Indian woman with the maniac who murdered my uncle, as you will see very soon.  When my uncle took leave of us, my father, noticing the family talisman—­which, by the way, was picked up by our ancestor, Raoul-de-Netherbie, the great Crusader, on the battle field of Acre, and was said to have belonged to an Eastern magician, and has remained an heirloom with the head of our family ever since—­inquired of his brother whether he was going to wear that outre jewel in open view upon his finger.  My uncle answered that he was; and half laughing, and wholly incredulous, he added: