"I drink to your freedom, Jack," she said, blindly, reeling into Mount's arms. "Your—freedom—Jack," she gasped, smiling; "my father drank to it—in ale. He lies dead on the floor of it. All this—for—for your freedom, Jack!"
Mount was kneeling in the mud; she lay in his arms, the sleet pattering on her upturned face.
"For your freedom," she murmured, drowsily—"a maid must burn in hell for that. I burn, I burn! Oh, the fire in me, Jack!"
Her body writhed and twisted; her great bright eyes never left his. Presently she lay still. A moment later the prison bell broke out wildly through the storm, and a gunshot rang from the north guard-house.
We placed the dead child under a tree in the new grass, and covered her face with willow branches, all silky with the young buds of April. Then, bending almost double, we ran south along the prison wall, turning west as the wall turned, and presently came to the wooden fence of King's Chapel.
Mount gained the top of the fence from my shoulders, and drew me up. Then we dropped.
There were lights moving in Governor's Alley and the mews; through the sleet great snow-flakes whirled into the slush of the filthy street. The prison bell rang frantically behind us.
"It's the alarm, Jack!" I whispered.
He gave me a dull look, then shivered in his wet buckskins.
"She can't lie out there in the sleet," he muttered, blood-shot eyes roving restlessly in the darkness. "I am going back!"