render them up to justice. Whether or not this were true, they were undiscovered; the little State was heavily mulcted for the outrage, and the perpetrators went scot free at large, the night and their masks having shrouded them, the pine-forests telling no tales, and the sole clue to their subsequent identification lying in Erceldoune's recognition by voice of their ringleader, as the vivacious and graceful bewailer for the sacrifice of crystallised violets, whom he had met at the Paris cafe.
The menace of England failed to track his assassins and bring them to their reckoning; but he swore that sooner or later his own vengeance should find them, and strike home to that tiger brute whose laugh he would know again though a score of years should have rolled away before they stood face to face.
"You bear no malice to your savage murderers, my son?" said the Abbess of Monastica to him, wistfully, one day, an aged woman, white-haired and venerable, gentle as a child, and unworldly as an infant, for she had taken the veil in her fourteenth year, and had never left the convent now that she had reached her seventieth, save on an occasional visit, as permitted by Moldavian rules, to the innocent festivities of Jassy.
