been very happy:  I wish we had more time—­’ I got mad again directly.  ‘D—­n you!’ I cried out, ’I’ll kill you now, and marry her some day.’  His old insolent smile came on his lip.  ‘No you won’t,’ he said; ’you don’t know how she hates you, and how we have laughed—­’ He had no time to say more, for I found my weapon then—­a stone triangular and sharp-pointed like a dagger—­and I struck him over the temple with all my force.  He gave one convulsive spring that threw me clear of him, and never stirred again.

“I did not repent when it was done; I have never repented since; I do not now.  I only thought how best to escape the consequences.  I took his watch and purse, that brigands might be suspected, and threw them into the river a mile off.  I robbed him of one thing more—­this!” All his haggard face was transfigured with a ghastly triumph as he opened a small leathern case that hung round his neck, and held up before us two locks of hair.

There they were—­the love-gift and the death-spoil—­the memorials of defeat and of victory, of foiled affection and of gratified hate—­the one, beguiled from Isabel by Bruce himself, with many earnest pleadings, in the early days of their engagement; the other, torn from her husband’s temples before they were cold.  The long light brown tress was scarcely more soft and satin-smooth than the chestnut curl; but one end of the last was matted, and discolored by a dark rusty stain—­the stain that, the Greek poet said, all the rivers of earth flowing in one channel could never wash away—­the testimony, to our ears mute enough now, but which, perhaps, will make itself heard above the Babel of all other cries at the Day of Judgment.

The two tokens were twined together lovingly, as if they were sensitive and conscious still.  Bruce plucked them asunder:  “I never can keep them apart,” he said, querulously.  Then he put them back into the case separately, and began to mutter to himself many words that I could not distinguish.

“Have you any thing more to say?” Livingstone asked.  His lips were rigid and compressed like a steel-trap, opening and closing mechanically.  As he spoke, he snatched the leathern bag from Bruce’s hand and threw it into the blazing fire.

A sharp howl, like a flogged hound’s, broke from the sick man as he saw his treasure shrivel up in the flame.  Then he began to whimper out all sorts of incoherent supplications, crying “that we did not know how much he had suffered before he killed Forrester, and since too; that he had been cruelly used from the beginning; that he was very, very ill now; would not we let him die in peace?” The tears were streaming down his face.  It was a sight of abasement that sent a shiver through one’s veins.

Guy laid his hand on the miserable creature’s shoulder.  Though he scarcely touched it, I saw the great muscles starting out on his arm like ropes from the intensity of his suppressed emotion; his lower lip trembled, but his tones did not in the least.  I can give no idea of their pitiless, deliberate ferocity.