His heart beating so thickly that for the moment utterance was impossible, Captain Jack made one hurried pace forward with outstretched hands, only to check himself, however, and let them fall by his side. He would meet her calmly, humbly, as he had resolved.
The woman threw back her veil, and it was Molly's dark gaze, Molly's brown face, flushed and haggard, yet always beautiful, that looked out of the black frame.
An ashen pallor spread over the prisoner's countenance.
"Madeleine?" he asked in a whisper; then, with a loud ring of stern demand, "Madeleine!"
"I went for her, I went for her myself—I did all I could—she would not come."
She would not come!
It is a sort of unwritten law that the supremely afflicted have the right, where possible, to the gratification of the least of their wishes. That Madeleine could refuse to come to him in his last extremity, had never once crossed her lover's brain. He stood bewildered.
"She is not ill?"
"Ill!" Lady Landale's red lips curved in scorn, "No—not ill—but a coward!" She spat the word fiercely as if at the offender's face.
There fell a minute's silence, broken only by a few labouring deep-drawn breaths from the prisoner's oppressed lungs. Then he stood as if turned to stone, not a muscle moving, his eyes fixed, his jaw set.