retreats valiantly to a closet window step by step and drops out,
leaving Monsereau spitted, like a black spider, dead on the floor. Here
hope and expectation are drawn out in your breast like chewing gum
stretched to the last shred of tenuation. At this point I firmly
believed that Bessy would escape. I feel sorry for the reader who does
not. You just naturally argue that the faithful Rely will surely reach
him and rub him with the balsam. That balsam of Dumas! The same that
D'Artagnan's mother gave him when he rode away on the yellow horse,
and which cured so many heroes hurt to the last gasp. That miraculous
balsam, which would make doctors and surgeons sing small today if they
had not suppressed it from the materia medica. May be they can silence
their consciences by the reflection that they suppressed it to enhance
the value and necessity of their own personal services. But let them
look at the death rate and shudder. I had confidence in Rely and the
balsam, but he could not get there in time. Then, it was forgone that
Bessy must die. Like Mercutio, he was too brilliant to live. Depend upon
it, these wizards of story tellers know when the knell of fate rings
much sooner than we halting readers do.

Bessy drops from the closet window upon an iron fence that surrounded
the park and was impaled upon the dreadful pickets! Even then for
another moment you can cherish a hope that he may escape after all.
Suspended there and growing weaker, he hears footsteps approaching. Is
it a rescuing friend? He calls out--and a dagger stroke from the hand of
D'Anjou, his Judas master, finds his heart. That's the way Bessy died.
No man is proof against the dagger stroke of treachery. Bessy was
powerful and the due jealous.

Diana has been carried off safely by the trustworthy St. Luc. She must
have died of grief if she had not been kept alive to be the instrument