tly down the path of
duty. But the compacts of life end with life. No man may bargain for the
beyond; even the marriage service shrinks from it. And now that hope had
gone and life was at its extremest ebb, why should they not take their
joy before they passed to the land where, perchance, such things will be
forgotten? So it seemed to them; if indeed they were any longer capable
of reason.

He looked into her eyes and she laid her head upon his heart in that
mute abandonment of worship which is sometimes to be met with in the
world, and is redeemed from vulgar passion by an indefinable quality of
its own. He looked into her eyes and was glad to have lived, ay, even to
have reached this hour of death. And she, lost in the abyss of her deep
nature, sobbed out her love-laden heart upon his breast, and called him
her own, her own, her very own!

Thus the long hours passed unheeded, till at last a new-born freshness
in the air told them that they were not far from dawn. The death they
were awaiting had not found them. It must now be very near at hand.

"John," she whispered in his ear, "do you think that they will shoot
us?"

"Yes," he answered hoarsely; "they must for their own sakes."

"I wish it were over," she said.

Suddenly she started back from his arms with a little cry, causing the
cart to rock violently.

"I forgot," she said; "you can swim, though I cannot. Why should you
not swim to the bank, and escape under cover of the darkness? It is only
fifty yards, and the current is not so very swift."

The idea of flight without Jess had never occurred to John, and now
that she suggested it, it struck him as so absurd that he broke into the
ghost of a laugh.

"Don't be foolish, Jess," he said.

"Yes, yes, I will. Go! You _must_ go! It does not matter about me now.
I know that you love me, and I can die happy. I will wait for you. Oh,
John! wherever I am, if I have any individual life and any remembrance
I will wait for you. Never forget that all your days. However far I may
seem away, if I live at all, I shall be waiting for you. And now go;
you _shall_ go, I say. No, I will not be disobeyed. If you will not go I
will throw myself into the water. Oh, the cart is turning over!"

"Hold on, for God's sake!" shouted John. "The traces have broken."

He was right; the tough leather was at length worn through by constant
rubbing against the rock, and the strain and sway of the dead horses on
the one side, an