ed over the cell again. "By Heaven, this death's cage is
enough to send any man off the hooks," he shivered.

"One gets used to it," I answered, shrugging.

He looked at me with a kind of admiration. "They may break you, Montagu,
but I vow they will never bend you. Here are you torn with illness, the
shadow of the gallows falling across your track, and never a whimper out
of you."

"Would that avail to better my condition?"

"I suppose not. Still, self-pity is the very ecstasy of grief, they tell
me."

"For girls and halfling boys, I dare say."

There he sat cocked on the table, a picture of smiling ease, raffish and
fascinating, as full of sentimental sympathy as a lass in her teens. His
commiseration was no less plain to me because it was hidden under a
debonair manner. He looked at me in a sidelong fashion with a question in
his eyes.

"Speak out!" I told him. "Your interest in me as evidenced by this visit
has earned the right to satisfy your curiosity."

"I dare swear you have had your chance to save yourself?" he asked.

"Oh, the usual offer! A life for a life, the opportunity to save myself by
betraying others."

"Do you never dally with the thought of it?" he questioned.

I looked up quickly at him. A hundred times I had nursed the temptation
and put it from me.

"Are you never afraid, Montagu, when the night falls black and slumber is
not to be wooed?"

"Many a time," I told him, smiling.

"You say it as easily as if I had asked whether you ever took the air in
the park. 'Slife, I have never known you flinch. There was always a
certain d----d rough plainness about you, but you play the game."

"'Tis a poor hound falls whining at the whip when there is no avoiding
it."

"You will never accept their offer of a pardon on those terms. I know you,
man. Y'are one of those fools hold by honour rather than life, and damme!
I like you for it. Now I in your place----"

"----Would do as I do."

"Would I? I'm not so sure. If I did it would be no virtue, but an
obstinacy not to be browbeat." Then he added, "You would give anything
else on earth for your life, I suppose?"

"Anything else," I told him frankly.

"Anything else?" he repeated, his eyes narrowing. "No reservations,
Montagu?"

Our eyes crossed like rapiers, each searching into the other's very soul.

"Am I to understand that you are making me an offer, Sir Robert?"

"I am making you an offer of your life."

"Respectfully declined."