e the victim of an arbitrary,
unjust power! And to perish at his age!

Hearing him rave, she shivered out of an agony of compassion and also
of some terror for herself. She would that he found it less hard to die.
And thinking this she thought further, and uttered some of her thought
aloud.

"I could have saved you, my poor Philip."

He started up, and showed her again that livid, distorted face of his.

"What do you mean?" he asked hoarsely. "You could have saved me, do you
say? Then--then why--"

"Ah, but the price, my dear," she sobbed.

"Price?" quoth he in sudden, fierce contempt. "What price is too great
to pay for life? Does this Rhynsault want all our wealth, then yield it
to him yield it so that I may live--"

"Should I have hesitated had it been but that?" she interrupted.

And then she told him, whilst he sat there hunched and shuddering.

"The dog! The foul German dog!" he muttered through clenched teeth.

"So that you see, my dear," she pursued brokenly, "it was too great a
price. Yourself, you could not have condoned it, or done aught else but
loathe me afterwards."

But he was not as stout-mettled as she deemed him, or else the
all-consuming thirst of life, youth's stark horror of death, made him a
temporizing craven in that hour.

"Who knows?" he answered. "Certes, I do not. But a thing so done, a
thing in which the will and mind have no part, resolves itself perhaps
into a sacrifice--"

He broke off there, perhaps from very shame. After all he was a man, and
there are limits to what manhood will permit of one.

But those words of his sank deeply into her soul. They rang again and
again in her ears as she took her anguished way home after the agony of
their farewells, and in the end they drove her out again that very night
to seek the Governor of Zeeland.

Rhynsault was at supper when she came, and without quitting the table
bade them usher her into his presence. He found her very white, but
singularly calm and purposeful in her bearing.

"Well, mistress?"

"May I speak to you alone?"

Her voice was as steady as her glance.

He waved away the attendants, drank a deep draught from the cup at his
elbow, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and sat back in his
tall chair to hear her.

"Yesterday," she said, "you made, or seemed to make, me a proposal."

He looked up at first in surprise, then with a faint smile on his
coarse, red mouth. His glance had read her meaning clearl