"I did what your eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over the precipice!" These last words struck Miriam like a bullet.

Could it be so?
Had her eyes provoked or assented to this deed?
She had not known it.

But, alas! looking back into the frenzy and turmoil of the scene just acted, she could not deny--she was not sure whether it might be so, or no--that a wild joy had flamed up in her heart, when she beheld her persecutor in his mortal peril.

Was it horror ?--or ecstasy?
or both in one?
Be the emotion what it might, it had blazed up more madly, when Donatello flung his victim off the cliff, and more and more, while his shriek went quivering downward.

With the dead thump upon the stones below had come an unutterable horror.
"And my eyes bade you do it!" repeated she.
They both leaned over the parapet, and gazed downward as earnestly as if some inestimable treasure had fallen over, and were yet recoverable.
On the pavement below was a dark mass, lying in a heap, with little or nothing human in its appearance, except that the hands were stretched out, as if they might have clutched for a moment at the small square stones.