tor. Still, it came to an end at last. The door on one side
was wrenched open; she was pulled out rather unceremoniously; then,
the pinioned Bertie, who was handed over to a guard; and the soldier
escort after him, who took his place promptly by his side. Vivie had
just time to note the ugly red-brick exterior of the main
building of the Tir National. It reminded her vaguely of some
hastily-constructed Exhibition at Earl's Court or Olympia. Then she
was pushed inside a swinging door, into a freezing corridor; where
the Prison Directeur and Monsieur Walcker were standing--irresolute,
weeping....

"Where is Bertie?" she asked.

"He is being prepared for the shooting party," they answered. "It
will soon be over ... dear dear lady ... try to be calm--"

"I will be as calm as you like," she said, "I will behave with the
utmost correctitude or whatever you call it, if you--if they--the
soldiers--the officer--will let me see him--as you promised--up to
the last, the very last. But by God--if there _is_ a God--if you or
they prevent me, I'll--"

Inexplicably, sheer mind-force prevailed, without the need for
formulating the threat the poor grief-maddened woman might have
uttered--she moved unresisted to a swing door which opened on to a
kind of verandah. Here was drawn up the firing party, and in front
of them, fifteen feet away on snow-sodden, trampled grass, stood
Bertie. He caught sight of Vivie passing in, behind the firing
party, and standing beyond them at the verandah rail. He
straightened himself; ducked his head aside from the handkerchief
with which they were going to bandage his eyes, and shouted "Take
away your blasted handkerchief! _I_ ain't afraid o' the guns. If
you'll let me look at HER, I'll stand as quiet as quiet."

The officer in command of the firing party shrugged his shoulders.
The soldier escort desisted from his attempts to blindfold the
Englishman and stood aside, out of range. Bertie fixed his glowing
eyes on the woman he had loved from his youth up, the rifles rang
out with a reverberating bellow, and he fell out of her sight,
screened by the soldiers, a crumpled body over which they threw a
sheet.

What happened then to Vivie? I suppose you expect the time-worn
trick of the weary novelist, anxious to put his pen down and go to
his tea: "Then she seemed swallowed up in a cloud of blackness and
knew no more"--till it was convenient to the narrator to begin a
fresh chapter. But with me it must