“Then you refuse to fly?” I demanded, trembling in my eagerness.
“I do,” says he.
“Then I hope you’ll hang,” I cried; “yes, simpleton that you are, I hope you’ll hang.”
However, at the mention of his certain fate, I was no longer mistress of myself, for I sat down suddenly in a very unreasonable fashion, covered my eyes with my hands, and allowed my tears to break forth in the most uncontrollable flood I’ve ever shed. When I desisted somewhat from this, and next looked up, the prisoner was at my side, and bending over me with a tenderness that added to my woe. Hardly a minute had fled since last I had seen his face, yet in that little time it appeared to have aged by twenty years. Great as my own pains were, I knew them to be equalled by his own, for he was plainly suffering a very bitter agony.
“Madam,” he said, with his native bluntness refined into a strange sweetness by his grief, “would to God I had never known you! You make the thought of death terrible hard to bear.”
“Oh!” I sobbed, with a ridiculous riot in my breast, “I thought I was never in your style; I thought you never cared; I thought——”
“You are a wonderful, brave woman,” he says, in a whisper, “a wonderful brave woman.”
One of his tears fell down upon my shoulder. Sore was I tempted to indulge myself with weeping, too, but knowing well that the prisoner had not a hope of life other than one that I might find him, I fought against my weakness till in a measure it was overcome. But the face of the prisoner was before me always, and again did my eyes grow dark and heavy with their tears.
“Child, do not be afraid,” I said, trying for conscience sake to affix on him the guilt that was my own. “Be brave; the matter is not so cruel as it looks.”
He did not answer, but his smile was grim. And it seemed wonderful to me that the faculties of his mind should remain so keen when Death’s shadow was darkening his heart.