asted.

Through close window and door the sigh of the night and the moan of the
far sea spoke continually, and covered to dull and finite ears the sound
of the sunrise coming over the distant hills.

Not dead, and not dead, and yet again not dead! With that recurrent
stroke of sense was welded again the mortal unit half gone to
dissolution. Day came filtering in on wan faces brightened to fearful
hope, for Christian assuredly lived and would live: consciousness held,
and his eyes waked and asked. The four knelt together, and thanked their
God aloud for his life, tears running free; he turned his head away in
great despair, knowing that he was condemned.

Whose prayers should prevail, theirs or his? He must die: he would die.
But every hour brought firmer denial to his pitiful desire for death.
What had he done, his anguish cried up to heaven, that his God should
withhold an honest due? For death and its blessed ease and safety had he
renounced the glorious sea-life, not for this intolerable infliction of a
life miserable, degraded, branded for ever with memory of one disgraceful
hour.

Fever declared that always still he stood within a circle of fire; his
skin was hot with the heat of men's eyes; the stroke of his blood was
pain and shame that he had to bear; always, always so it would be.

Healing came to close the wounds of his body, but the incurable wounds of
a proud spirit gaped and bled hot and fresh, and even under the pitying
eyes of love quivered and shrank. A sound from the outer world, of
footstep or voice, crushed him intolerably under fresh weights of
degradation.

The sound of footstep and voice would start hasty barring of shutter and
door, hinting to him that his doom of life was yet remittant.

With infinite caution, and despite his great weakness and pain, he got
his knife into his own secret keeping. Out of sight it lay bare for a
fond hand to kiss its sweet keen line: life held some blisses it could
promise him yet.

Indefinite revenge was not enough: the thought of actual elaborate murder
grew so dear, he would not for any price forgo it. Himself would be
satisfied, his hands, his eyes, his ears, with the circumstances of a
bloody despatch from life of him, and him, and him, each witness of his
torture and shame, beneath whose remembered eye his spirit now shrieked
and writhed. Let him so doing perish body and soul. So low in the dust
lay he, the dear hope of Lois, because the heart of his