"Girl!" and in his fury he turned pale as the dead man beside him, and seized her by both wrists. "How? By what means? Who? This is Lawrence Lee's handiwork? Speak."
Her lips moved, but she made no answer.
The looming gallows.
"Betrayed!" he wailed forth in a paroxysm of impotent fury, "and brought to naught! Destroyed like any wind-bag. All our holy work—our sacred compact. By the machinations of a frivolous girl, and a love-sick Don Quixote of a boy! Oh, Ruth, Ruth! Little Ruth, was he indeed more to you than your father—and your very faith? Ay, but 'tis so—'tis so. What have you done? And is it nothing to you neither, that this brave night's work of your's must see me swing for it on Tyburn tree?"
"Father! father! No, no," shuddered Ruth. "There is time—time yet to escape."
"Ho! Is there so?" cried he with a grating bitter laugh. "I protest now, my daughter, you are really too tender and dutiful. Time is there? Time for me to play the poltroon's part, and make a byword and a scorn of myself while the world lasts! No, let them take me here. And yet—"
A father lost.
He paused, and his hold on Ruth's arms relaxed, so that she slowly fell away from him, while he stood sternly gazing into the chilly morning haze as though he saw in it some prophetic vision. "And yet," he murmured, "to be hunted down so. To let myself be trapped like vermin—when still I may be preserved, for an instrument to crush out the superstition and the tyranny of these evil days that darken more and more—"
"Father! father!" implored Ruth. "Quick! By the vaults. Before it is too late!"
"Yes," he went on, letting his keen glance drop on her for a moment, and then fixing it again like some prophetic seer, on empty space. "So it shall be. And my voice shall yet once more be uplifted to cry: Woe! woe! to the doers of wickedness in high places. Yes, I will live. I will live! I will stoop, even to the very dust beneath my feet—to conquer. I will live—and if every hair of my head were a man, I would venture them all in this quarrel."