ords.
Then as the minutes fled and my brother raised a warning hand, she
turned toward him, and said:

"You are in earnest? We must separate in shame or perish in this
prison-house with you?"

His answer was mere repetition, mechanical, but firm:

"You have said it. You have but one minute more, madam."

She shrank, and all her powers seemed leaving her, then a reaction came,
and a flaming angel stood where but a moment before the most delicate of
women weakly faltered; and giving me a look to see if I had the courage
or the will to lift my hand against my own flesh and blood (alas for us
both! I did not understand her) caught up an old Turkish dagger lying
only too ready to her hand, and plunged it with one sideways thrust into
his side, crying:

"We cannot part, we cannot die, we are too young, too happy!"

It was sudden; the birth of purpose in her so unexpected and so rapid
that Felix, the ready, who was prepared for all contingencies, for the
least movement or suggestion of escape, faltered and pressed, not the
fatal button, but his heart.

One impulsive act on the part of a woman had overthrown all the
fine-spun plans of the subtlest spirit that ever attempted to work its
will in the face of God and man.

But I did not think of this then; I did not even bestow a thought upon
the narrowness of our escape, or the price which the darling of my heart
might be called upon to pay for this supreme act of self-defence. My
mind, my heart, my interest were with Felix, in whom the nearness of
death had called up all that was strongest and most commanding in his
strong and commanding spirit.

Though struck to the heart, he had not fallen. It was as if the will
which had sustained him through thirty years of mental torture held him
erect still, that he might give her, Eva, one look, the like of which I
had never seen on mortal face, and which will never leave my heart or
hers until we die. Then as he saw her sink shudderingly down and the
delicate woman reappear in her pallid and shrunken figure, he turned his
eyes on me and I saw,--good God!--a tear well up from those orbs of
stone and fall slowly down his cheek, fast growing hollow under the
stroke of death.

"Eva! Eva! I love Eva!" shrilled the voice which once before had
startled me from the hollow vault above.

Felix heard, and a smile faint as the failing rush of blood through his
veins moved his lips and brought a revelation to my soul. He, too, loved
Eva