"Will trouble her no more," I replied. "I wonder if you remember what I said to you once—twenty long years ago?"
"I hope I remember," she whispered. "Say the words again."
"I lay under sentence of death; I was to die the next morning. You came to me; you had travelled hard and fast to reach me before they killed me. Do you remember?"
She bowed her head, and whispered that she did. I went on—repeating the words I had used so long before; they had been in my mind many many times since, and I had not forgotten them.
"This is what I said to you. 'In the years that are coming it may happen, in God's own good time, that some child you love may stand in need of a friend who will strike as I struck—fight as I fought—for her honour. It may happen, long after I am dead and forgotten by all but you, that some such an one may spring up, to do again more perfectly what I did—springing from the dead ashes of my past to work out the pitiful story I began.' Do you remember?"
"Perfectly," she whispered; and now she looked at me with startled eyes.
"I never thought then," I went on, "that it would fall to me to do again what I did then; I was as one dead when I spoke those words. But all things have fitted in so wonderfully and so strangely; there is no drawing back for me, and there is no one else who can strike the blow—no one with a greater right."
She drew me away out of the room, and closed the door; we stood together on the landing outside, looking into each other's eyes—I very calm and resolute, and she trembling and afraid.
"You must not think of it," she whispered; "you must never think of it. There must be some other way—some better way. Not again, Charlie—for the love of God!—not again!"