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All on the Wolf now stood watching the Hitachi's last struggle with the waves, a struggle which, thanks to her murderers, could have but one end; and the German officers stood on the Wolf's deck taking photos at different stages of the tragedy. There the two ships now rested, the murderer and the victim, alone on the ocean, with no help for the one and no avenging justice for the other.

And then the Preacher turned from that awful image of an angry and avenging God to contemplate Divine compassion in the Redeemer of mankind godlike power joined with human love. He preached of Christ the Saviour with a fulness and a force which were new to Angela. He held up that commanding, that touching image, unobscured by any other personality.

It was certain that it was a relative of "Snow" Gregory who was called Jack o' Judgment and who had taken upon himself the task of avenging the man's death. What was "Snow" Gregory's real name? If he could find that, he might find Jack o' Judgment.

He stretched his hand on high; over his lofty brow and royal features there came an expression, of unutterable solemnity and command. "Behold!" he shouted with a voice of thunder, which stilled the roar of the crowd: "behold how the gods protect the guiltless! The fires of the avenging Orcus burst forth against the false witness of my accusers!"

He does not believe in any God, and yet the terrible fears that spring up in his soul, born fungus-like from a few drops of blood, take shape and form, and seem to cry aloud, "We are the messengers of the avenging God." He glances up.

"What want you, sirs?" said he, unmoved and unfaltering, though in the officers of justice he recognized faces he had known before, and in that distant town in which all that he dreaded in the past lay treasured up. At the sound of his voice the spell that for an instant had arrested the step of the avenging son melted away. "Seize him!" he cried to the officers; "you see your prisoner."

"Oh, Biron, Biron," he faintly groaned, "why must I overthrow you? You loved me, and perhaps would one day have accorded me what you at first refused! Biron, I have betrayed you with a kiss. It is your guardian angel who is now avenging you!" Thus he reached his palace, and the servants who opened the door of his carriage started back with alarm at the fearful expression of their master's face.

Yet, since he who ought to punish him is not for him a prince and judge, but only a father quite as guilty as the son, I myself will seek him out, and I will sacrifice my own life, not only in avenging my own injury and the blood of so many innocent beings, but also in promoting the welfare of the most serene republic, on which it is his ambition to trample when he has accomplished the ruin of the other princes of Italy."

His face deathly, and the lack-lustre eyes dully on fire, Nicol Brinn burst out of the room and, not heeding the presence of Harley, hurled himself down the stairs. He was as a man demented, an avenging angel. "There he is!" cried Harley "heading for the Dover Road!"

And it was at a critical period, in the midst of the pious alarms and desires of atonement excited by the expectation of the end of the world a thousand years after the coming of the Lord, that the Christian population saw this way opened for purchasing remission of their sins by delivering other Christians from suffering, and by avenging the wrongs of their creed.