then he stood calm and silent waiting for Flamin to fire. His old friend
pointed the pistol straight at his heart, but hesitated; and Clotilda
recovered her senses and staggered to her feet, and threw herself before
her lover. Flamin looked at them in gloomy wonder without lowering his
pistol. He would have liked to kill them both with one shot, but the
instinct of a life-long friendship unnerved him. He hurled his pistol
away, saying, "It isn't worth troubling to kill a scoundrel like you,"
and then turned and strode fiercely through the forest.

* * * * *

Some weeks afterwards Victor was standing on the watch-tower at St. Luna
alone, with a letter from Lord Horion in his hand. He looked down from
the height, and he was tempted to throw himself over. He had regained
the friendship of Flamin, but it seemed to him that he had now lost all
hope of winning Clotilda. For Lord Horion had explained the whole of the
strange, tortuous policy which he had used in regard to Prince January.
He informed Victor that he had introduced Flamin to the prince, and had
proved to him that the young man was his heir. "They asked me, my dear
Victor," Horion went on to say in his letter, "a question which I was
surprised at your not asking. If Flamin is the son of the prince, where
is the son of Chaplain Eymann whom I took to London to be educated with
him? My dear boy, I have no son, and you really are the child of Eymann
and his good wife. This secret I felt bound to reveal to the prince at
the same time that I was forced to reveal the secret of Flamin's birth.
It was because I wished to postpone the revelations until you were
established in the prince's good graces that I made you take the oath
that you took so unwillingly."

Victor felt that what the heir to a great English nobleman might aspire