“Marguerite!” he cried aloud, as he sprang to his feet, so that the house rang with his cry. A sob, a wail of despair answered him, a clink as the heavy key dropped from her startled hands. He found her blindly fumbling at the bolts, distraught with her need of haste.
“Paul, let me go! Let me go!” she cried.
He lifted her in his arms as one lifts a child and carried her back into the court.
“Marguerite!” he whispered. “A step outside that tunnel dressed as you are, now that Fez is awake, and—”
“I know, I know,” she interrupted him. “I should be out of your way altogether. Oh, Paul, let me go! I have been thinking of it all night. I can’t take, all the time, and everything you have that’s dear to you! Let me give too—something in return—my life, my dear, that’s worth so little. Oh, Paul, let me give it now, when I am ready to give it—before my courage goes,” and she struggled and beat upon his breast with her small fists in a frenzy.
But he held her close to him. “Poor child, what a night of horror she must have lived through,” he reflected. Lying on her bed in the dark, waiting for the first gleam of dawn, for the first sounds of the city’s awakening, and shutting her eyes and her ears against the terror of these savage and wild-eyed fanatics, forbidding her heart to sink before the ordeal of her great sacrifice. She had decked herself out in her jewels, like that bride of whom she had told him, but for a different reason; that she might the sooner attract notice and invite murder.
“It was mad, Marguerite!” he cried, and then, holding her to his heart. “But it was splendid!”
Already her strength was waning. She no longer struggled. She hung in his arms. Her hands stroked his face.
“Let me go, Paul,” she pleaded, “won’t you? It will be quick. The first of them who sees me! Oh, while I can do it. My dear, my dear, I’ll gladly die for you, I love you so.”
“Quick?” exclaimed Paul Ravenel, savagely. “You don’t know them! I have seen our men on the battlefields. Quick? My dear, they would bind you hand and foot and give you to their women to mutilate alive.”