.

WHAT WAS BEHIND THE MASK.
The cowering form rose up; but, seeing who it was, sank down again, with its face groveling in the dust, and with another prolonged, moaning cry.
"Madame Masque!" he said, wonderingly; "what is this ?" He bent to raise her; but, with a sort of scream she held out her arms to keep him back.
"No, no, no! Touch me not! Hate me--kill me! I have murdered your friend!" Sir Norman recoiled as if from a deadly serpent.
"Murdered him! Madame, in Heaven's name, what have you said ?" "Oh, I have not stabbed him, or poisoned him, or shot him; but I am his murderer, nevertheless!" she wailed, writhing in a sort of gnawing inward torture.
"Madame, I do not understand you at all! Surely you are raving when you talk like this." Still moaning on the edge of the plague-pit, she half rose up, with both hands clasped tightly over her heart, as if she would have held back from all human ken the anguish that was destroying her, "NO--no! I am not mad--pray Heaven I were! Oh, that they had strangled me in the first hour of my birth, as they would a viper, rather than I should have lived through all this life of misery and guilt, to end it by this last, worst crime of all!" Sir Norman stood and looked at her still with a dazed expression.

He knew well enough whose murderer she called herself; but why she did so, or how she could possibly bring about his death, was a mystery altogether too deep for him to solve.
"Madame, compose yourself, I beseech you, and tell me what you mean.

It is to my friend, Ormiston, you allude--is it not ?" "Yes--yes! surely you need not ask." "I know that he is dead, and buried in this horrible place; but why you should accuse yourself of murdering him, I confess I do not know." "Then you shall!" she cried, passionately.

"And you will wonder at it no longer! You are the last one to whom the revelation can ever be made on earth; and, now that my hours are numbered, it matters little whether it is told or not! Was it not you who first found him dead ?" "It was I--yes.