It was the elemental woman breaking from the soul that yesterday was so vainglorious. The young man looking upon her from his precarious coign felt his heart leap to her in her abasement. In the delicacy of her youth she was the fairest thing upon which ever he had set his eyes. It hurt him keener than his own fate that a beauty so rare should, whatever its faults, have been chastened so cruelly. All that there was of chivalry in his tender soul went out to her in her desolation. In his three-and-twenty years of life he had never known love, but by God’s grace was it given that he would not have to die without tasting the rarest of all mortal experiences. “Mistress”--his heart leaped in his throat so that he could hardly breathe--“Give me your name, sweet mistress, and I will promise as God is in His heaven that on Tuesday morning when Gervase Heriot comes to die by the ax he shall pass with your name upon his lips.” Like wells of soft light her eyes shone up to him. “My name is Anne,” she said, with a simplicity that yesterday had not been hers. “Mistress Anne, will you pray for me when I am passing?” He could not hear her answer, yet he knew what it was. “God keep you, sweet mistress! God keep you forever! I will bear your name on my lips through all the wide fields of eternity.” These high-vaunting words were his last. No longer could he keep his precarious hold on the top of the wall. The strain on arms and knees was too much. Suddenly the eyes so full of courage and pity were lost to her. Anne was left to reel against the wall of her prison, shaken with an anguish more terrible than any the long night had known. CHAPTER VI GERVASE HERIOT had entered upon the last hours of his life. It was arranged that he should die at eight o’clock of the April morning. He lay in his cell during the watches of the night that was to be his last upon earth, with every sense a-stretch. Try as he would--and God only could know how he had fought during these last weeks for self-mastery--he could not subdue the insurgency of ardent blood, the intense desire to live. He was too young for death. He loved the sun, the blue sky, the green grass, the birds in the trees, the spring flowers, the abundant, sweet-smelling earth. He loved his fellow-men. They amused and interested him. He adored the beauty of women. His ears were attuned to delicate harmonies of sound, his eyes were ravished by feasts of color. The world, that wonderful assemblance of things visible, entranced him in its glad, mysterious majesty. There was the soul of a poet in a frame all a-quiver with youth. As he lay in his cell in the darkness, tossing feverishly upon his pallet through the slow hours, he could not bear the thought that all too soon he would see the sun rise for the last time.