"Where are they now?"
"Locked up."
"Where?"
"In the stable."
"Give them to me."
"No, ma'am."
"You refuse?"
"I do. I care too much for you to give 'em up."
She turned aside, her face for the first time softening from the stony immobility of the earlier day, and the corners of her mouth resuming something of that delicacy of cut which was always lost in her moments of despair. At last she confronted him again.
"Why should I not die if I wish?" she said tremulously. "I have made a bad bargain with life, and I am weary of it—weary. And now you have hindered my escape. O, why did you, Charley! What makes death painful except the thought of others' grief?—and that is absent in my case, for not a sigh would follow me!"