speak.

* * * * *

The day came when the duke gravely informed her that Michael was found
guilty of murder.

Fay's prayers it seemed had not availed. She prayed no more. There was
no help in God. Probably there was no God to pray to. Her sister
Magdalen seemed to think there was. But how could she tell? Besides,
Magdalen had such a calm temperament, and nothing had ever happened to
make her unhappy, or to shake her faith. It was different for Magdalen.

Evidently there was no justice anywhere, only a blind chance. "The truth
will out," Fay had said to herself over and over again. She had tried to
have faith. But the truth had not come out. She was being pushed, pushed
over the edge of the precipice. Oh, why had Michael fallen in love with
her when they were boy and girl! She remembered with horror and disgust
those early days, that exquisite dawn of young passion in the time of
primroses. It had brought her to _this_--to this horrible place of tears
and shame and shuddering--to these wretched days and hideous nights. Oh,
why, why, had he loved her! Why had she let herself love him!

Suddenly she said to herself, "They may reprieve him yet. If his
sentence is not commuted to imprisonment I will speak, so help me God I
will."

It could never be known whether she would have kept that oath, for the
next day she heard that Michael had been sentenced to fifteen years'
imprisonment. Why had Andrea been so cruel as to let her imagine for a
whole horrible night that Michael's would be a death sentence, when in
Italy it seemed there was no capital punishment as in England? It was
just like Andrea to torture her needlessly! When the sentence reached
her Fay drew breath. The horrible catastrophe had been averted. To a man
of Michael's temperament the living grave to which he was consigned was
infinitely worse than death. But what was Michael's temperament to Fay?
She shut her eyes to the cell of an Italian prison. Michael would live,
and in time the truth would come to light, and he would be released.

She impressed this conviction with tears on his half-brother Wentworth
Maine, the kind, silent elder brother, Michael's greatest friend, who
had come out to Italy to be near him, and who heard sentence given
against him with a set face, and an unshaken belief in his innocence.
Even to Wentworth Michael had said nothing, could be induced to say no
word. He confessed to the murder. That was all.