“Price?” quoth he in sudden, fierce contempt. “What price is too great to pay for life? Does this Rhynsault want all our wealth, then yield it to him yield it so that I may live—”
“Should I have hesitated had it been but that?” she interrupted.
And then she told him, whilst he sat there hunched and shuddering.
“The dog! The foul German dog!” he muttered through clenched teeth.
“So that you see, my dear,” she pursued brokenly, “it was too great a price. Yourself, you could not have condoned it, or done aught else but loathe me afterwards.”
But he was not as stout-mettled as she deemed him, or else the all-consuming thirst of life, youth's stark horror of death, made him a temporizing craven in that hour.
“Who knows?” he answered. “Certes, I do not. But a thing so done, a thing in which the will and mind have no part, resolves itself perhaps into a sacrifice—”
He broke off there, perhaps from very shame. After all he was a man, and there are limits to what manhood will permit of one.
But those words of his sank deeply into her soul. They rang again and again in her ears as she took her anguished way home after the agony of their farewells, and in the end they drove her out again that very night to seek the Governor of Zeeland.
Rhynsault was at supper when she came, and without quitting the table bade them usher her into his presence. He found her very white, but singularly calm and purposeful in her bearing.