"At what a cost! Your own perdition!"
"No, no. Listen. Morales leaves here the day before my unhappy father is given his chance of escape--the door of his cell will be set open for him at night; none will bar his exit by a back way--I, too, shall be gone. Morales will take me with him in my own proper garb, that of a woman. Then--then--because I shall not believe in my father's freedom until I am sure of it, know it, he will join us at the frontier--not the one which we passed, but where the road crosses to Braganza at a place called Carvallos--and----"
"You will keep your word!"
"Yes. To myself--not him. My father will be safe--Morales unable to do more against him--I--I shall be dead. Once I am assured all is well with him I shall end my life. There will be nothing more to live for."
"Suppose," I whispered, "suppose--it might be!--that I should escape, and, doing so, find you dead! Oh, Juana, how would it be with me then? How could I live?"
"Ah, my love," she said, whispering, too, "can you not believe I have thought of that--believe that if all hope of your escaping was not gone I should not have decided thus? But, Mervan, you are a brave man, have faced death too often to fear to do so once again for the last time. Mervan, my love, my life--there is no hope. None. He has told me--he--Morales--that the morning after all are gone but you, you will surely be put to death. My own, my sweet, there is no hope."
"If I could escape first----"
"It is impossible. Impossible. Oh! I have begged him on my knees again and again to give you the same chance as he gives my father--have told him that, since he ruins himself to set free the one, it would cost him no more to let both go--yet, yet--he will not."
"Why not?"
"I have said. And he makes but a single answer. One is my father--the other my lover. Laughs, too, and says he does not jeopardise his own body--ruin for certain his own life in his own land--to fling that lover back into my arms."