“Your grandfather was a fool, Jasper Trenoweth, to despise her; for she was young then and she could wait.  She was beautiful then, and Amos Trenoweth himself had loved her.  What is she now?  Speak, for you have seen her.”

As he spoke I seemed to see again that yellow face, those awful, soulless eyes, and hear her laugh as she gazed down from the box upon my dying love.

“Ah, beauty goes.  It went for ever on that day when Amos Trenoweth spat in her face and taunted her as she clung to the body of her husband.  Beauty goes, but revenge can wait; to-night it has come; to-night a thousand dead men’s ghosts shall be glad, and point at your body as it goes tossing out to sea.  To-night—­but let me tell the rest in a word or two, for time presses.  How I was brought up, how my mad mother—­for she is mad on every point but one—­trained me to the sea, how I left it at length and became an attorney’s clerk, all this I need not dwell upon.  But all this time the thought of revenge never left me for an hour; and if it had, my mother would have recalled it.

“Well, we settled in Plymouth and I was bound a clerk to your grandfather’s attorney, still with the same purpose.  There I learnt of Amos Trenoweth’s affairs, but only to a certain extent; for of the wealth which he had so bloodily won I could discover nothing; and yet I knew he possessed riches which make the heart faint even to think upon.  Yet for all I could discover, his possessions were simply those of a struggling farmer, his business absolutely nothing.  I was almost desperate, when one day a tall, gaunt and aged man stepped into the office, asked for my employer, and gave the name of Amos Trenoweth.  Oh, how I longed to kill him as he stood there!  And how little did he guess that the clerk of whom he took no more notice than of a stone, would one day strike his descendants off the face of the earth and inherit the wealth for which he had sold his soul—­the great Ruby of Ceylon!

“My voice trembled with hate as I announced him and showed him into the inner room.  Then I closed the door and listened.  He was uneasy about his Will—­the fool—­and did not know that all his possessions would necessarily become his son’s.  In my heart I laughed at his ignorance; but I learnt enough—­enough to wait patiently for years and finally to track Ezekiel Trenoweth to his death.

“It was about this time that I fell in love.  In this as in everything through life I have been cursed with the foulest luck, but in this as in everything else my patience has won in the end.  Lucy Luttrell loved another man called Railton—­John Railton.  He was another fool—­you are all fools—­but she married him and had a daughter.  I wonder if you can guess who that daughter was?”

He broke off and looked at me with fiendish malice.

“You hound!” I cried, “she was Janet Railton—­Claire Luttrell; and you murdered her father as you say Amos Trenoweth murdered yours.”