Sholto’s cry rang sudden, loud, despairing.

“Dead—­dead—­Earl William dead—­my master dead!”

He dropped the palfrey’s rein, which till now he had held.  His sword fell unheeded on the turf, and he flung himself down in an agony of boyish grief.  But from her white palfrey, sitting still where she was, the maiden watched the paroxysms of his sorrow.  She was dry eyed now, and her face was like a mask cut in snow.

Then as suddenly recalling himself, Sholto leaped from the ground, snatched up his sword, and again passionately advanced upon the Lady Sybilla.

“You it was who betrayed him,” he cried, pointing the blade at her breast; “answer if it were not so!”

“It is true I betrayed him,” she answered calmly.

“You whom he loved—­God knows how unworthily—­”

“God knows,” she said simply and calmly.

“You betrayed him to his death.  Why then should not I kill you?”

Again she smiled upon him that disarming, hopeless, dreadful smile.

“Because you cannot kill me.  Because it were too crowning a mercy to kill me.  Because, for three inches of that blade in my heart, I would bless you through the eternities.  Because I must do the work that remains—­”

“And that work is—?”

“Vengeance!!”

Sholto was silent, trying to piece things together.  He found it hard to think.  He was but a boy, and experience so strange as that of the Lady Sybilla was outside him.  Yet vaguely he felt that her emotion was real, more real perhaps than his own instinct of crude slaying—­the desire of the wasp whose nest has been harried to sting the first comer.  This woman’s hatred was something deadlier, surer, more persistent.

“Vengeance—­” he said at last, scarce knowing what he said, “why should you, who betrayed him, speak of avenging him?”

“Because,” said the Lady Sybilla, “I loved him as I never thought to love man born of woman.  Because when the fiends of the pit tie me limb to limb, lip to lip, with Judas who sold his master with a kiss, when they burn me in the seventh hell, I shall remember and rejoice that to the last he loved me, believed in me, gloried in his love for me.  And God who has been cruel to me in all else, will yet do this thing for me.  He will not let William Douglas know that I deceived him or that he trusted me in vain.”

“But the Vengeance that you spoke of—­what of that?” said Sholto, dwelling upon that which was uppermost in his own thought.

“Aye,” said the Lady Sybilla, “that alone can be compassed by me.  For I am bound by a chain, the snapping of which is my death.  To him who, in a far land, devised all these things, to the man who plotted the fall of the Douglas house—­to Gilles de Retz, Marshal of France, I am bound.  But—­I shall not die—­even you cannot kill me, till I have brought that head that is so high to the hempen cord, and delivered the foul fiend’s body to the fires of both earth and hell.”