Think!  How could he think?  Whenever he shut his eyes there arose before them a vision of his mother’s face, a face so fearful in its awesome and unnatural calm that vaguely he wondered how he, the outcast son, upon whom it had been turned like the stare of the Medusa’s head, withering his very soul, could have seen it and still live.  Why did he live?  Why was he not dead, he who had a sword at his side?  Was it because of his innocence?  He was not guilty of this dreadful crime.  He had never intended to hand over Dirk van Goorl and Foy and Martin to the Inquisition.  He had only talked about them to a man whom he believed to be a professor of judicial astrology, and who said that he could compound draughts which would bend the wills of women.  Could he help it if this fellow was really an officer of the Blood Council?  Of course not.  But, oh! why had he talked so much?  Oh! why had he signed that paper, why did he not let them kill him first?  He had signed, and explain as he would, he could never look an honest man in the face again, and less still a woman, if she knew the truth.  So he was not still alive because he was innocent, since for all the good that this very doubtful innocence of his was likely to be even to his own conscience, he might almost as well have been guilty.  Nor was he alive because he feared to die.  He did fear to die horribly, but to the young and impressionable, at any rate, there are situations in which death seems the lesser of two evils.  That situation had been well-nigh reached by him last night when he set the hilt of his sword against the floor and shrank back at the prick of its point.  To-day it was overpast.

No, he lived on because before he died he had a hate to satisfy, a revenge to work.  He would kill this dog, Ramiro, who had tricked him with his crystal gazing and his talk of friendship, who had frightened him with the threat of death until he became like some poor girl and for fear signed away his honour—­oh, Heaven! for very fear, he who prided himself upon his noble Spanish blood, the blood of warriors—­this treacherous dog, who, having used him, had not hesitated to betray his shame to her from whom most of all it should have been hidden, and, for aught he knew, to the others also.  Yes if ever he met him—­his own brother—­Foy would spit upon him in the street; Foy, who was so hatefully open and honest, who could not understand into what degradation a man’s nerves may drag him.  And Martin, who had always mistrusted and despised him, why, if he found the chance, he would tear him limb from limb as a kite tears a partridge.  And, worse still, Dirk van Goorl, the man who had befriended him, who had bred him up although he was no son of his, but the child of some rival, he would sit there in his prison cell, and while his face fell in and his bones grew daily plainer, till at length his portly presence was as that of a living skeleton, he would sit there by the window, watching the dishes of savoury food pass in and out beneath him, and between the pangs of his long-drawn, hideous agony, put up his prayer to God to pay back to him, Adrian, all the woe that he had caused.