"You don't mean," stammered the General, "that the ruffian who murdered my brother--has been--reprieved?"

"It is said, sir, that imprisonment for life is a worse punishment than death," said Hubert gently. The face of no man--even of one condemned to life-long punishment--could have expressed deeper gloom than his own as he said the words. Yet mingling with the gloom there was something inflexible that gave it almost a repellent character. It was as if he would have thrown any show or pity back into the face of those who offered it, and defied the world to sympathise with him on account of some secret trouble which he had brought upon himself.

"Worse than death--worse than death!" repeated the old man. "I do not know what you mean, sir. I shall go up to town at once and see Harbury about this matter. It is in his hands----"

"Not now," interposed Hubert. "The Queen----"

"The Queen will hear reason, sir! I will make my way to her presence, and speak to her myself. She will not refuse the prayer of an old man who has served his country as long and as faithfully as I have done. I will tell her the story myself, and she will see justice done--justice on the man who murdered my brother!"

His voice grew louder and his breath came in choking gasps between the words. His face was purple, the veins on his forehead were swollen and his eyes bloodshot; with one hand he was leaning on the table, with the other he gesticulated violently, shaking the closed fist almost in Hubert's face, as if he mistook him for the murderer himself. It was a pitiable sight. The old man had completely lost his self-command, and his venerable white hairs and bowed form accentuated the harrowing effect which his burst of passion produced upon his hearers. Hubert stood silent, spell-bound, as it seemed, with sorrow and dismay; but Miss Vane, shaking off her unwonted timidity, went up to her brother and laid her hand upon his outstretched quivering arm.

"Richard, Richard, do not speak in that way!" she said. "It is not Christian--it is not even human. You are not a man who would wish to take away a fellow-creature's life or to rob him of a chance of repentance."

The General's hand fell, but his eyes flamed with the look of an infuriated beast of prey as he turned them on Miss Leonora.

"You are a woman," he said harshly, "and, as a woman, you may be weak; but I am a man and a soldier, and would die for the honor of my family.

Not take away that man's life? I swear to you that, if I had him here, I would kill him with my own hands! Does not the Scripture tell us that a life shall be given for a life?"

"It tells us that vengeance is the Lord's, Richard, and that He will repay."

"Yes--by the hands of His servants, Leonora. Are you so base as not to desire the punishment of your brother's murderer! If so, never speak to me, never come near my house again! And you, young gentleman, get ready to come with me to London at once! I will see Harbury before the day is over."

"My dear General," said Hubert, looking exceedingly perplexed, "I think that you will hardly find Harbury in town. I heard yesterday that he was leaving London for a few days."

"Nonsense, sir! Leaving London before the close of the session!

Impossible! But we can get his address and follow him, I suppose? I will see Harbury to-night!"

"It will be useless," said Hubert, with resignation, "but, if you insist----"

"I do insist! The honor of my house is at stake, and I shall do my utmost to bring that ruffian to the gallows! I cannot understand you young fellows of the present day, cold-blooded, effeminate, without natural affection--I cannot understand it, I say. Ring the bell for Saunders; tell him to put up my bag. I will go at once--this very moment--this----"

The General's voice suddenly faltered and broke. For some time his words had been almost unintelligible; they ran into one another, as if his tongue was not under the control of his will. His face, first red, then purple, was nearly black, and a slight froth was showing itself upon his discolored lips. As his sister and cousin looked at him in alarm, they saw that he staggered backwards as if about to fall. Hubert sprang forward and helped him to his chair, where he lay back, with his eyes half closed, breathing stertorously, and apparently almost unconscious.

The rage, the excitement, had proved too much for his physical strength; he was on the verge, if he had not absolutely succumbed to it, of an apoplectic fit.

The doctor was sent for in haste. All possibility of the General's expedition to London was out of the question, very much to Miss Vane's relief. She had been dreading an illness of this kind for some days, and it was this fear which had caused her to telegraph for Hubert before breaking to her brother the news that she herself had learned the night before. She had seen her father die of a similar attack, and had been roused to watchfulness by symptoms of excitement in her brother's manner during the last few days. The blow had fallen now, and she could only be thankful that matters were no worse.

When the doctor had come--he was met half-way up the drive by the messenger, on his way to pay a morning visit to Mrs. Sydney--and when he had superintended the removal of the General to his room, Hubert was left for a time alone. He quitted the dining-room and made his way to his favorite resort at Beechfield Hall--a spacious conservatory which ran the whole length of one side of the house. Into this conservatory, now brilliant with exotics, several rooms opened, one after another--a small breakfast-room, a study, a library, billiard-room, and smoking-room. These all communicated with each other as well as with the conservatory, and it was as easy as it was delightful to exchange the neighborhood of books or pipes or billiard-balls for that of Mrs. Vane's orchids and stephanotis-blossoms. Poor Mrs. Vane used to grumble over the conservatory. It was on the wrong side of the house--the gentlemen's side, she called it--and did not run parallel with the drawing-room; but the very oddness of the arrangement seemed to please her guests.

Hubert had always liked to smoke his morning cigar amongst the flowers, and, as he paced slowly up and down the tesselated floor, and inhaled the heavy perfume of the myrtles and the heliotrope, his features relaxed a little, his eyes grew less gloomy and his brow more tranquil.

He glanced round him with an air almost of content, and drew a deep breath.

"If one could live amongst flowers all one's life, away from the crimes and follies of the rest of the world, how happy one might be!" he said to himself half cynically, half sadly, as he stooped to puff away the green-fly from a delicate plant with the smoke of his cigar. "That's impossible, however. There's no chance of a monastery in these modern days! What wouldn't I give just now to be out of all this--this misery--this deviltry?" He put a strong and bitter accent on the last word. "But I see no way out of it--none!"

"There is no way out of it--for you," a voice near him said.

Without knowing it, he had spoken aloud. This answer to his reverie startled him exceedingly. He wheeled round to discover whence it came, and, to his surprise, found himself close to the open library window, where, just inside the room, a girl was sitting in a low cushioned chair.

He took the cigar from his mouth and held it between his fingers as he looked at her, his brow contracting with anger rather than with surprise. He stood thus two or three minutes, as if expecting her to speak, but she did not even raise her eyes. She was a tall, fair girl with hair of the palest flaxen, artistically fluffed out and curled upon her forehead, and woven into a magnificent coronet upon her graceful head; her downcast eyelids were peculiarly large and white, and, when raised, revealed the greatest beauty and the greatest surprise of her face--a pair of velvety dark-brown eyes, which had the curious power of assuming a reddish tint when she was angry or disturbed. Her skin was of the perfect creaminess which sometimes accompanies red hair--and it was whispered by her acquaintances that Florence Lepel's flaxen locks had once been of a decidedly carroty tinge, and that their present pallor had been attained by artificial means. Whether this was the case or not it could not be denied that their color was now very becoming to her pale complexion, and that they constituted the chief of Miss Lepel's many acknowledged charms. For, in a rather strange and uncanny way, Florence Lepel was a beautiful woman; and, though critics said that she was too thin, that her neck was too long, her face too pale and narrow, her hair too colorless for beauty, there were many for whom a distinct fascination lay in the unusual combination of these features.

She was dressed from head to foot in sombre black, which made her neck and hands appear almost dazzlingly white. Perhaps it was also the sombreness of her attire which gave a look of fragility--an almost painful fragility--to her appearance. Hubert noted, half unconsciously, that her figure was more willowy than ever, that the veins on her temples and her long white hands were marked with extraordinary distinctness, that there were violet shadows on the large eyelids and beneath the drooping lashes. But, for all that, the bitter sternness of his expression did not change. When he spoke, it was in a particularly severe tone.

"I should be obliged to you," he said, still holding his cigar between his fingers, and looking down at her with a very dark frown upon his face, "if you would kindly tell me exactly what you mean."

CHAPTER IV.

Florence Lepel raised her beautiful eyes at last to her brother's face.

"I only repeat what you yourself have said. There is no way out of it--for you."

Her voice was quite even and expressionless, but Hubert's face contracted at the sound of her words as if they hurt him. He raised his cigar mechanically to his lips, found that it had gone out, and, instead of relighting it, threw it away angrily from him amongst the flowers.

His sister, her eyes keen notwithstanding the velvety softness of their glance, saw that his hands trembled as he did so.

"I should like to have some conversation with you," he said, in a tone that betokened irritation, "if you can spare a little time from your duties."

"They are not particularly engrossing just now," said Miss Lepel evenly, indicating the book that lay upon her lap. "I am improving my mind by the study of the French language," she said. "The General knows nothing of French authors since the days of Racine, and will think me quite laudably employed in reading a modern French novel."

"The General is not likely to find you anywhere to-day, nor for many a day to come."

"Is he dead?" asked his sister, ruffling the pages of her book. She did not look as if anybody's death could disturb her perfect equanimity.

"Are you a fiend, Florence," Hubert burst out angrily, "that you can speak in that manner of a man who has been so great a benefactor, so kind a friend, to both of us? Have you no heart at all?"

"I am not sure. If ever I had one, I think that it was killed--three months ago."

Her voice sank to a whisper as she uttered the last few words. Her breath came a little faster for a second or two--then she was calm again. Her brother looked at her with an air of stupefaction.

"How dare you allude to that shameful episode in your life," he said sternly, "and to me, of all people!"

"If not to you, I should certainly speak of it to no one," she answered quietly. There was a sudden blaze of light in the red-brown eyes beneath the heavily-veined eyelids.

"You are my only safety-valve; I must speak sometimes--or die.

Besides"--in a still lower tone--"I see nothing shameful about it. We have done no harm. If he loved me better than he loved his chattering commonplace little wife, I was not to blame. How could I help it if I loved him too? It was _kismet_--it had to be. You should not have interfered."

"And pray what would have happened if I had not interfered? What shame, what ruin, what disgrace!"

"It is useless for you to rant and rave in that manner," said Florence Lepel, letting her eyes drop once more to the open pages of her French novel. "You did interfere, and there is an end of it. And what an end!

You must be proud of your work. He dead, Marion dying, the General nearly mad with grief, the man Westwood hanged for a crime that he never committed!"

"Westwood has been reprieved," said Hubert sharply.

"What a relief to you!" commented his sister, with almost incredible coolness.

He turned away from her, catching at his throat as if something rose to choke him there. His face was very pale; the lines of pain about his eyes and mouth were plainer and deeper than they had been before.

Florence glanced up at him and smiled faintly. There was a strange malignity in her smile.