"If Miss Lindsay desires the name of the chaplain, I can gratify her wish. Peyton Knox has recently officiated in the prison chapel."
A hot wave crimsoned her cheeks, and she shrank as if from a blow, but as the color ebbed, she drew herself proudly to her full height.
"As any other total stranger claiming every citizen's right of petition, I reluctantly intrude upon your leisure, and I appeal to you as a man, as a gentleman, as the highest official of my State, to grant some mercy to a doomed criminal. For humanity's sake—oh, Governor Armitage, for the sake of a ruined and helpless family, I ask—I beg—that you will pardon Ronald Clinton and save two women from insanity! Be merciful; oh, be merciful, as every Governor can be if he so wills."
He watched her steadily, and once he drew a long, deep breath as if sorely oppressed; but her anxiously searching gaze discovered no relaxation. She suddenly leaned forward, and her exquisitely curved lips quivered:
"You will not deny my prayer! You will pardon Ronald?"
Slowly he shook his head.
"Miss Lindsay, I shall never pardon him. At all costs I must be absolutely just."
"You will not spare his life? when your office empowers you to set him free? You cruelly elect to order his wife widowed, and his babes disgraced!"
"Should I forget the widow and fatherless little ones of Norman Hewitt whom Ronald Clinton deliberately and brutally murdered? The wrongs of the dead are too often buried with him, and sickly sympathy—posing as philanthropic Christian clemency—is lavished on branded Cains set free to defy human and divine law, and repeat crimes that should have forfeited their blackened lives."
"Your Excellency's standard of justice is more righteous than that of Abel's God, Who instead of slaying his murderer granted him long life in which to purify his guilty soul and mend his ways!"