"How?" asked the Countess. "Is he not in the Tower?--Is not my father Lord High Chamberlain?--Are you not a Privy Councillor?--Will the King refuse you anything you ask in reason?--Rochester, Rochester! means are not difficult if you will be firm. But place a secure man as Lieutenant of the Tower, and leave the rest to me. What! would you have yourself overthrown by a worm--by a viper?--Will you leave a snake to sting you, when, by one stroke of your heel, you can tread it into nothing? You have done all you have done, more than could be expected, to avoid the necessity he forces on you. You offered him rank, station, and high employment! He refused them all, and his own obstinacy sent him to the Tower. Now he would charge and calumniate you, knowing right well, that slander always leaves part of its venom behind, whatever antidote we apply. He gives you no choice, he forces you to declare that he or you must perish." "It is but too true," replied Rochester, gazing on the ground somewhat gloomily; "and yet I would to Heaven he did not force me to deal with him harshly." "Ay, but he does," exclaimed the Countess. "Tell me, if two men are in a sinking boat that will but bear one, has not the strongest every right to cast the other into the sea, and save himself?" She paused for an answer, and her lover replied, "I think he has; but still he may regret to do it." "True," said Lady Essex, "true; and so do I, and so do you. But if that man were an enemy, who had brought him there only to take his life? He who weakly stands in fear of a man he can destroy, deserves the fate that he spares the other. Had he been content to bear, even for some short time, with meekness and forbearance, the punishment he has called down on his own head, he might have lived on in peace, for aught you would have said or I have done against him. But now, Rochester," she added, laying her fair and beautiful hand upon his arm, and speaking in a low but emphatic tone, "but now, he must die! Do you mark me?--He must die! It is not hate that makes me speak; we could have afforded to hate him, and yet let him live. I practise nought against the life of Essex, though Heaven knows I have hated him enough. But to dread is different--to live in continual fear of what a fellow being may say--to know that our secrets are at the mercy of an enemy--to see him strive to curb us at his will, like a groom upon a managed horse, because he has got the bridle of fear between our jaws, is not an existence to be tolerated for an hour. Fling me, I say, such a rider to the dust and break his neck, or you are not half a man. This letter, this base and insolent letter, is his death-warrant!" And she struck it with the back of her fingers, with all the passion and vehemence of her nature. "He has signed it with his own hand," she added. "It is his own deed! and as he has planted the tree, so let him eat the fruit."