"Or at the wheel-house when you called to warn the soldiers?"
"You were about to—to throw yourself over!" she faltered.
"And your Ladyship was apprehensive lest the Black Seigneur should escape?"
"Escape?" she cried. "It was death!"
"And the alternative? My Lady preferred to see the outlaw taken—die like a felon on the gallows!"
"No; no! It was not that."
"What then?" His eyes gleamed bright; her own turned; shrank from them. A moment she strove to answer; could not. Within the black recess a faint light from the flickering candle played up and down. So complete the stillness, so dead the very air, the throbbings of her pulses filled the girl with a suffocating sense of her own vitality.
"I spoke to my father to try to get your cell changed," she at last found herself irrelevantly saying; "but could do nothing."
"I thank your Ladyship! But your Ladyship's friends will be far away. Your Ladyship may miss something amusing!"
"I did not bring them—did not want them to come!"