Hellish, isn't it?"

"Ah, and he must be very lonely. Fancy the terror of it!"

It was only gossip, which might be expected under such circumstances,
but it fired Mary Bolitho's imagination. It helped her to realise the
situation more keenly even than she had yet realised it. Paul swinging
on a scaffold! Paul dead! Then she knew the secret of her heart.
What she had never dreamt of as possible became a tremendous reality.
He was the one man in all the world for her. Without him life would be
a great haggard misery. She did not know why it was, or how it was,
but the man had become king of her life; and he was lying in a prison
cell accused of murder!

She must do something; she must! She felt as though she were going
mad; she free in the streets of Manchester, free to live her own life,
to follow her desires, while he lay there alone, with the shadow of the
scaffold resting upon him! And he was innocent. She was sure he was
innocent. She had no more a doubt about it than of her own existence.
The evidence at the Brunford Town Hall and at the coroner's inquest was
nothing to her. Circumstantial evidence was nothing. The gossip which
was so freely bandied was nothing. Paul was innocent, and she loved
him. But what could she do? Rather, what must she do? Regardless of
the consequences, she immediately took steps whereby she might be
enabled to see the prisoner.

Naturally Paul had no idea of the thoughts that were surging in her
mind. He never dreamed of what she intended to do. He sat alone in
his cell, thinking and wondering. He had given up all hope of ever
seeing Mary again. All his fond imaginings had come to nothing. The
resolutions he had made were but as the wind. One day he was full of
hope, full of determination; he would conquer difficulties, he would
laugh at impossibilities; the next day all hope had gone; defeat,
disgrace, horror blotted out everything else.

That was the greatest burden he had to bear. His life broken off in
the middle? Yes, he could face that. The career which promised great
things utterly destroyed--well, that did not seem to matter. The
destruction of the dreams of a lifetime? Terrible as it was, he met it
with a kind of grim despair. But the loss of Mary Bolitho--to feel
that he would never see her again, never hear her voice again, never
enter into the joy which he had promised himself should be his--that
was terrible beyond words.

He had no belief