“The court broke up at midday, and the man went straight, unconfessed, to the place of his punishment.  They tied him to the tree nearest his own door, and the count sat by while he howled his life out under the lash.  He was hardly dead by sundown.”

“It was revenge, not justice,” Mrs. Bellasys said, more firmly than was her wont.  I saw the quick, impatient movement of her daughter’s little foot; she did not appreciate her mother’s moralities.

The answer came in the deepest of Livingstone’s deep, stern tones.

“He was no saint, but a man, and a very miserable one; he acted according to his light, and in his despair caught at the weapon that was nearest to his hand.  After all, the blood of a base, brutal hound, take it in what fashion you will, is a poor compensation for one life cut short in agony, and another blasted utterly.

“Mohun knew the count’s family.  Some of them, maiden aunts I suppose, were devotees of the first order:  these came in person, or sent their pet priests, to argue with him on his unchristian habits of sullen solitude.  The men of his old set came too, to laugh him out of the horrors.  Saint and sinner got the same answer—­a shake of the head, a curse, a threat if he were not left alone, growled out between deep draughts of strong Moldavian wine.  They went, and were wise; for his pistols lay always beside him—­in case his servants offended him, or if he should take a sudden fancy to suicide—­and the shaking finger could have pulled a trigger still.

“After a little he left Vienna, shut himself up in his castle, and would see no one.

“In England they would have tried at the ‘de lunatico’ statute; but his next of kin left him in peace, biding their time as patiently as they could.  They had not to wait long; in four years a good constitution broke up, suddenly at last, and the count exchanged stupor for a sleep with his fathers, without benefit of clergy.  Perhaps they would not have given him absolution, for he died certainly not in charity with all men.”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Bellasys objected, with a timid obstinacy; “I can not argue with you; but I am sure it was very wrong.”

I struck in to the meek little woman’s rescue.

“That’s right, Mrs. Bellasys, don’t let him put you down with the high hand; it’s always his way when truth is against him; but I never knew him break down a stubborn fact yet.”

Guy turned upon me directly.

“Frank, I have often remarked in you, with pain, quite a feminine propensity to theorize.  Women will do it.  My dear Mrs. Bellasys, don’t look so dreadfully like an accusing angel about to bring me to book; you know I am a hopeless heretic.  They get up a sort of Memoria Technica in early youth, and it clings to them all their life through.  If they go astray, they never cease proclaiming aloud that ’they know it’s very wrong;’ though eminently unpractical, they think it due to