so unkind as to destroy it."

And as he spoke his face bent nearer to her own, his flaming eyes
devoured her, and his arm slipped softly, snake-like round her to draw
her to him. But before it had closed its grip she had started away,
springing back in horror, an outcry already on her pale lips.

"One word," he admonished her sharply, "and it speaks your husband's
doom!"

"Oh, let me go, let me go!" she cried in anguish.

"And leave your husband in the hangman's hands?" he asked.

"Let me go! Let me go!" was all that she could answer him, expressing
the only thought of which in that dread moment her mind was capable.

That and the loathing on her face wounded his vanity for this beast was
vain. His manner changed, and the abysmal brute in him was revealed in
the anger he displayed. With foul imprecations he drove her out.

Next day a messenger from the Governor waited upon her at her house with
a brief note to inform her that her husband would be hanged upon the
morrow. Incredulity was succeeded by a numb, stony, dry-eyed grief, in
which she sat alone for hours--a woman entranced. At last, towards dusk,
she summoned a couple of her grooms to attend and light her, and
made her way, ever in that odd somnambulistic state, to the gaol of
Middelburg. She announced herself to the head gaoler as the wife of
Philip Danvelt, lying under sentence of death, and that she was come to
take her last leave of him. It was not a thing to be denied, nor had the
gaoler any orders to deny it.

So she was ushered into the dank cell where Philip waited for his doom,
and by the yellow wheel of light of the lantern that hung from the
shallow vaulted ceiling she beheld the ghastly change that the news of
impending death had wrought in him. No longer was he the self-assured
young burgher who, conscious of his innocence and worldly importance,
had used a certain careless insolence with the Governor of Zeeland. Here
she beheld a man of livid and distorted face, wild-eyed, his hair and
garments in disarray, suggesting the physical convulsions to which he
had yielded in his despair and rage.

"Sapphira!" he cried at sight of her. A sigh of anguish and he flung
himself, shuddering and sobbing, upon her breast. She put her arms about
him, soothed him gently, and drew him back to the wooden chair from
which he had leapt to greet her.

He took his head in his hands and poured out the fierce anguish of
his soul. To die innocent as he was, to b