smiled sadly, and then snatching the dagger from him, she plunged it into
her own heart. I cannot tell whether this be true, or whether she waited
to be killed by him; but this I know, that in the same circumstances I
think I should have saved my lover or my friend the pain of killing me.
There she lay dead, at any rate, and he buried her in the wood, and
returned to the house; and, as it happened, he had set his right foot in
her blood, and his shoe was wet in it, and by some miraculous fate it left
a track all along the wood-path, and into the house, and on the stone
steps of the threshold, and up into his chamber, all along; and the
servants saw it the next day, and wondered, and whispered, and missed the
fair young girl, and looked askance at their lord's right foot, and turned
pale, all of them, as death.

"And next, the legend says, that Sir Forrester was struck with horror at
what he had done, and could not bear the laboratory where he had toiled so
long, and was sick to death of the object that he had pursued, and was
most miserable, and fled from his old Hall, and was gone full many a day.
But all the while he was gone there was the mark of a bloody footstep
impressed upon the stone doorstep of the Hall. The track had lain all
along through the wood-path, and across the lawn, to the old Gothic door
of the Hall; but the rain, the English rain, that is always falling, had
come the next day, and washed it all away. The track had lain, too, across
the broad hall, and up the stairs, and into the lord's study; but there it
had lain on the rushes that were strewn there, and these the servants had
gathered carefully up, and thrown them away, and spread fresh ones. So
that it was only on the threshold that the mark remained.

"But the legend says, that wherever Sir Forrester went, in his wanderings
about the world, he left a bloody track behind him. It was wonderful, and
very inconvenient, this phenomenon. When he went into a church, you would