quickly. "I will
go into the next room, but I beg that you be brief, monsieur and madame.
You owe it to yourselves and to the situation to be brief, and, if I may
say so, you owe it to me. I am not a practised Ananias."

"As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, m'sieu'," returned Masson.

"I must beg that you will make your farewells of a minute and no more,"
replied the Clerk of the Court firmly. He took out his watch. "It is
six o'clock. I will come again at three minutes past six. That is long
enough for any farewell--even on the gallows."

Not daring to look at the face of the woman, he softly disappeared into
the other room, and shut the door without a sound.

"Too good for this world," remarked the master-carpenter when the
door closed tight. He said it after the disappearing figure and not to
Carmen. "I don't suppose he ever kissed a real grown-up woman in his
life. It would have shattered his frail little carcass if, if"--he
turned to his companion--"if you had kissed him, Carmen. He's made of
tissue-paper,--not tissue--and apple-jelly. Yes, but a stiff little
backbone, too, or he'd not have faced me down."

Masson talked as though he were trying to gain time. "He said three
minutes," she returned with a look of death in her face. As George
Masson had talked with the Clerk of the Court, she had come to see, in
so far as agitation would permit, that he was not the same as when he
left her by the river the evening before.

"There's no time to waste," she continued. "You spoke of
farewells--twice you spoke, and three times he spoke of farewells
between us. Farewells--farewells--George--!"

With sudden emotion she held out her arms, and her face flushed with
passion and longing.

The tempest which shook her shook him also, and he swayed from side to
side like an animal uncertain if the moment had come to try its strength
with its foe; and in truth the man was fighting with himself. His
moments with Jean Jacques at the flume had expanded him in a curious
kind of way. His own arguments while he was fighting for his life
had, in a way, convinced himself. She was a rare creature, and she was
alluring--more alluring than she had ever been; for a tragic sense had
made her thinner, had refined the boldness of her beauty, had given a
wonderful lustre to her eyes; and suffering has its own attraction to
the degenerate. But he, George Masson, had had a great shock, and he had
come out of the jaws of death by the skin