"You have my answer. Sir Robert, you have played
your last card. Now let me die in peace."

He shrugged impatiently and left me. "A fool's answer, yet a brave man's
too," he muttered.

Aileen, heart-broken with the failure of her mission, reached town on
Thursday and came at once to the prison. Her face was as the face of
troubled waters. I had no need to ask the question on my lips. With a
sobbing cry she threw herself on my breast. My heart was woe for her.
Utter weariness was in her manner. All through the long days and nights
she had agonized, and now at last despaired. There seemed no tears left to
shed.

Long I held her tight, teeth set, as one who would keep his own perforce
from that grim fate which would snatch his love from him. She shivered to
me half-swooning, pale and of wondrous beauty, nesting in my arms as a
weary homing-bird. A poignant grief o'erflowed in me.

"Oh, Aileen! At least we have love left," I cried, breaking the long
silence.

"Always! Always!" her white lips answered.

"Then let us regret nothing. They can do with me what they will. What are
life and death when in the balance dwells love?" I cried, rapt in
unearthly worship of her.

Her eyes found mine. "Oh, Kenneth, I cannot--I cannot--let you go."

Sweet and lovely she was beyond the dream of poet. I trembled in an
ecstasy of pain. From the next cell there came to us softly the voice of a
poor condemned Appin Stewart. He was crooning that most tender and
heart-breaking of all strains. Like the pibroch's mournful sough he wailed
it out, the song that cuts deep to a Scotchman's heart in time of exile.

"Lochabar no more, Lochabar no more.
We'll maybe return to Lochabar no more."

I looked at Aileen, my face working. A long breath came whistling through
her lips. Her dear face was all broken with emotion. I turned my eyes
aside, not daring to trust myself. Through misty lashes again I looked.
Her breast lifted and fell in shaking sobs, the fount of tears touched at
last. Together we wept, without shame I admit it, while the Stewart's
harrowing strain ebbed to a close. To us it seemed almost as the keening
of the coronach.

So in the quiet that comes after storm, her dear supple figure still in my
arms, Sir Robert Volney came in unexpectedly and found us. He stopped at
the door, startled at her presence, and methought a shadow fell on his
face. Near to death as I was, the quality of his courage wa