'These are not my orders!' quoth he in the mask, curtly.
Lennox flashed a little ebon staff, with a golden crown set upon the summit, before his eyes.
'Would'st thou argie-bargie with me?' he said, 'then right soon another shall take thy bishopric and (as thou dost others) shalt shepherd thee to Hades.'
Whereat Marjorie, robed in her clear-shining white, took the hand of James Mure, the man that was about to die.
'Husband,' said she, calmly, 'I have asked pardon for thee from God—do thou also ask it now, ere swift death take thee. Ask it both from God and man.'
For she had been his ministrant angel in the prison. And her own heart being changed—vengeance in the drinking not seeming so sweet a cup as it had appeared in the mixing. She had also won the sullen mechanic heart of him, who, according to the law of the land, had been so long her husband. She had showed him the way to a certain sum of faith, penitence, and hope. Which, perchance, he snatched at, not so much for themselves, but as the best things which were left to him.
'James, won thou forth on thy way. Fear not! Thou shalt not be long alone,' she said to him.
And, staggering a little, he moved across the scaffold. He would have fallen but that Marjorie set his hand upon her shoulder and put her arm about him. So he came forward stumbling like a man in sore sickness, as doubtless he was.
'I am a sinful man,' he said, so that some, at least, could hear him. 'Pray for me, good people. Keep your hands from blood, as I have not kept mine. And, Marjorie, though thou didst never love me, love me now, and bide with me till I die.'
'Fear not,' she said; 'I will stand beside thee, and not only here. I have a message that I shall right soon be called to journey with thee further, meeting thee somewhere by the way that thou must go.'