"But you will not see a man die, if you can save him?" she pleaded,
unable now to meet his look, its mastery and its depth.

Her heart had almost leaped with joy at the suggestion that he could not
stay; but as suddenly self-reproach and shame filled her mind, and she
had challenged him so. But yet, what right had she to sacrifice this man
she loved to the perverted criminal who had spoiled her youth and taken
away from her every dear illusion of her life and heart? By every right
of justice and humanity she was no more the wife of Henry Meydon than if
she had never seen him. He had forfeited every claim upon her, dragged
in the mire her unspotted life--unspotted, for in all temptation, in her
defenceless position, she had kept the whole commandment; she had, while
at the mercy of her own temperament, fought her way through all, with a
weeping heart and laughing lips. Had she not longed for a little home
with a great love, and a strong, true man? Ah, it had been lonely,
bitterly lonely! Yet she had remained true to the scoundrel, from whom
she could not free herself without putting him in the grasp of the law to
atone for his crime. She was punished for his crimes; she was denied the
exercise of her womanhood in order to shield him. Still she remembered
that once she had loved him, those years ago, when he first won her heart
from those so much better than he, who loved her so much more honestly;
and this memory had helped her in a way. She had tried to be true to it,
that dead, lost thing, of which this man who came once a year to see her,
and now, lying with his life at stake in the hospital, was the repellent
ghost.

"Ah, you will not see him die?" she urged.

"It seems to move you greatly what happens to this man," he said, his