he blurted out the fact--

"--has robbed me, and run away."

"Don't send him to prison, Mr. Archer," shrieked Sara, and laid
herself on the floor at his feet with a grovelling motion, as if
striving with her mother earth for comfort. There was not a film of
art in this. She had never been to a theatre. The natural urging of
life gave the truest shape to her entreaty. Her posture was the result
of the same feeling which made the nations of old bring their
sacrifices to the altar of a deity who, possibly benevolent in the
main, had yet cause to be inimical to them. From the prostrate living
sacrifice arose the one prayer, "Don't send him to prison; don't send
him to prison!"

Stephen gazed at her in bewildered admiration, half divine and all
human. A certain consciousness of power had, I confess, a part in his
silence, but the only definite shape this consciousness took was of
beneficence. Attributing his silence to unwillingness, Sara got
half-way from the ground--that is, to her knees--and lifted a face of
utter entreaty to the sight of Stephen. I will not say words fail me
to describe the intensity of its prayer, for words fail me to describe
the commonest phenomenon of nature: all I can is to say, that it made
Stephen's heart too large for its confining walls. "Mr. Archer," she
said, in a voice hollow with emotion, "I will do _anything_ you like.
I will be your slave. Don't send Charley to prison."

The words were spoken with a certain strange dignity of
self-abnegation. It is not alone the country people of Cumberland or
of Scotland, who in their highest moments are capable of poetic