Silvain received the letter which Kristel had written to him. It breathed the deepest hate, and Silvain had the unhappiness of reading the outpourings of a relentless, vindictive spirit, driven to despair by disappointed love.

"'You have robbed me,' the letter said; 'hour by hour, day by day, have you set yourself deliberately to ensnare me and to fill my life with black despair. Had I suspected it at the time I would have strangled you. But your fate is only postponed; revenge is mine, and I hold it in my soul as a sacred trust which I shall fulfil. You shall die by my hands. Never in this world or in the next will I forgive you! My relentless hate shall haunt and pursue you, and you shall not escape it!'

"And then the writer recorded an awful oath that, while life remained within him, his one sole aim should be to compass his revenge. It was a lengthy letter, and strong as is my description of it, it falls short of the intense malignity which pervaded every line. Kristel launched a curse so terrible against his brother that Silvain's hair rose up in horror and fear as he read it. These are Silvain's own words to me:

"'After reading Kristel's letter,' he said, 'I felt that I was accursed, and that it was destined that he should kill me.'

"How to escape the terrible doom--though he had scarcely a hope of averting it--how to prevent the crime of blood-guiltiness lying upon Kristel's soul: this was thereafter the object of Silvain's life. It afforded him no consolation to know that for the intense hate with which Kristel's heart was filled Avicia's father was partly responsible.

"In its delineation of the trickery by which Kristel had been robbed of Avicia the letter was not truthful, for there had occurred between the brothers a conversation in which Silvain had revealed his love for her. Kristel's over-wrought feelings probably caused him to forget this--or it may have been a perversion of fact adopted to give sanction to hate.

"Kristel's letter was not the only despairing greeting which awaited Silvain in the home of his boyhood. By some unhappy means the inheritance left by his father had melted away, and he found himself a beggar. Thus he was unable to carry out the terms of the bargain Avicia's father had made with him. This part of his misfortune did not greatly trouble him; it was but a just punishment to a grasping, avaricious man; but with beggary staring him in the face, and his brother's curse and awful design weighing upon him, his situation was most 

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