s so fine and
the strength of the passion in him so great that he would have changed
places with me even then.

Aileen went up to him at once and gave him her hand. She was very simple,
her appeal like a child's for directness.

"Sir Robert, you have already done much for me. I will be so bold as to
ask you to do more. Here iss my lover's life in danger. I ask you to save
it."

"That he may marry you?"

"If God wills."

Volney looked at her out of a haggard face, all broken by the emotions
which stirred him.

A minute passed, two minutes. He fought out his fight and won.

"Aileen," he said at last, "before heaven I fear it is too late, but what
man can do, that will I do."

He came in and shook hands with me. "I'll say good-bye, Montagu. 'Tis
possible I'll see you but once more in this world. Yet I will do my best.
Don't hope too much, but don't despair."

There was unconscious prophecy in his words. I was to see him but the once
more, and then the proud, gallant gentleman, now so full of energy, was
lying on his deathbed struck out of life by a foul blow.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE SHADOW FALLS

It would appear that Sir Robert went direct from the prison to the club
room at White's. He was observed to be gloomy, preoccupied, his manner not
a little perturbed. The usual light smile was completely clouded under a
gravity foreign to his nature. One may guess that he was in no humour to
carry coals. In a distant corner of the room he seated himself and fell to
frowning at the table on which his elbow rested. At no time was he a man
upon whom one would be likely to foist his company undesired, for he had
at command on occasion a hauteur and an aloofness that challenged respect
even from the most inconsiderate.

We must suppose that he was moved out of his usual indifference, that some
long-dormant spring of nobility was quickened to a renewed life, that a
girl's truth and purity, refining his selfish passion, had bitten deep
into the man's callous worldliness. For long he sat in a sombre silence
with his head leaning on his hand, his keen mind busy with the problem--so
I shall always believe--as to how he might even yet save me from the
gallows.

By some strange hap it chanced that Sir James Craven, excited with drink,
the bile of his saturnine temper stirred to malignity by heavy losses at
cards, alighted from his four in hand at White's shortly after Volney.
Craven's affairs had gone from bad to worse