pervade this small
room, with its narrow window through which the rays of the sun came
gradually in more golden splendour as the day drew towards noon, and
then they vanished altogether.

The drony voice close beside her acted as a soporific upon her nerves.
In the afternoon she fell into a real and beneficent sleep....

But after that, she woke to full consciousness!

Oh! the horror, the folly of it all!

It came back to her with all the inexorable force of an appalling
certainty.

She was a prisoner in the hands of those who long ago had sworn to bring
The Scarlet Pimpernel to death!

She! his wife, a hostage in their hands! her freedom and safety offered
to him as the price of his own! Here there was no question of dreams
or of nightmares: no illusions as to the ultimate intentions of her
husband's enemies. It was all a reality, and even now, before she had
the strength fully to grasp the whole nature of this horrible situation,
she knew that by her own act of mad and passionate impulse, she had
hopelessly jeopardized the life of the man she loved.

For with that sublime confidence in him begotten of her love, she never
for a moment doubted which of the two alternatives he would choose, when
once they were placed before him. He would sacrifice himself for her; he
would prefer to die a thousand deaths so long as they set her free.

For herself, her own sufferings, her danger or humiliation she cared
nothing! Nay! at this very moment she was conscious of a wild passionate
desire for death.... In this sudden onrush of memory and of thought she
wished with all her soul and heart and mind to die here suddenly, on
this hard paillasse, in this lonely and dark prison... so that she
should be out of the way once and for all... so that she should NOT be
the hostage to be bartered against his precious life and freedom.

He would suffer acutely, terribly at her loss, because he loved her
above everything else on earth, he would suffer in every fibre of his
passionate and ardent nature, but he would not then have to endure
the humiliations, the awful alternatives, the galling impotence and
miserable death, the relentless "either--or" which his enemies were even
now preparing for him.

And then came a revulsion of feeling. Marguerite's was essentially a
buoyant and active nature, a keen brain which worked and schemed and
planned, rather than one ready to accept the inevitable.

Hardly had these thoughts of despair and