"Sir," said Hamish, driven at last beyond his patience, and hardly knowing how to break his news more gently, "it needs not to be a prophet to foresee that the widow of a royalist and a Catholic to boot, shut up in prison and condemned on a false charge of murder, is in danger—nay, said I danger?—and is as certain of her doom as if she were already in her coffin."
Nellie uttered a wild cry, the first and last that escaped her lips that day, and Lord Netterville repeated faintly, "Murder!"
"Ay, murder; and in another week she dies," Hamish answered, now desperate as to the consequences of his revelation.
Nellie turned short round toward Roger:
"I must go!" she said. "I must go at once."
"Of course you must," he answered, in that helpful tone which had so often that morning already reassured her.
"She has sent me hither to conduct you," Hamish—with some latent jealousy of the interference of a stranger—was beginning, when, unable any longer to conceal the bodily anguish he was enduring, he uttered a moan of pain, and leaned back against the low wall of the pier.
Then for the first time Nellie looked into his face, and saw that he was as white as ashes.
"My God! my God!" she cried in her perplexity. "What is to become of us? He is dying too."
"No, no," Hamish mustered his failing strength to answer, "It is nothing. They shot at me as I took boat from the beach, and hit me in the arm; but it is not broken, and if only I could stop the bleeding, I should be well enough to start at once."