“It’s no good,” he said. “I am caught. And if I had not been a hasty fool, I could have come here with guardias and set you free.”
“Don’t think that for an instant,” she said. “They were going to cut my throat if there were any rescue. ‘We shall all die together,’ he told me. It’s death to him to be caught here, but he was determined that I should die first. Guardias would not have saved me.”
“I haven’t done much,” he said.
“You have done everything,” she said.
The red glow on the fuse suddenly changed to yellowish; a little flame sprang up out of the glow: it wavered like a candle-flame.
“The thing is going to explode,” she said.
“I think so, it is bad fuse: it is burning.”
“How long have we?”
“Perhaps less than a minute.”
“Could you sing something?”