After a while he said faintly, "My time will be up to-morrow morning."
"Yes!"
Twilight faded into night. Mrs. Raynor went into the house for a while, then returned to sit by her patient, sending the nurse out. One and another came to the cell-door, looked in, spoke a word, then went away. The heavy doors clanged, there was a sound of rattling bars as the prison was closed for the night, then silence settled all over. The dying man lay perfectly quiet, breathing slowly, and responding now and then to the prayers read by his attendant. He felt no pain, and his mind was clear and calm. He had no complicated intellectual mechanism to confuse his ideas of right and wrong; there was no labyrinth of sophistry to entangle his faith, no flutter of imagination to start a latent fear. He had done what he could; and he held on to the promises with an iron grasp.
That lonely watcher almost feared for him. Might he not be presuming on an act of devotion which, after all, rose from a love that was entirely human?
"My friend," she said, "even the angels are not pure before God. Perhaps you loved your brother too well."
"If I had loved him less, he would have been lost," was the calm reply. "I haven't loved him well enough to sin for him."
"Do not be too sure," she said.
"I'm a poor, ignorant man; but I've done as well as I knew how; and he has promised. I never broke a promise to man nor woman; and do you think that the Almighty would do the thing that I would scorn to do?"
"Are you not afraid of presumption?"
"It would be presumption to doubt the word of God."