For he saw the mask fall away from her--he saw her face. And with a wild scream--a scream that penetrated to the hearts of all in the Place de Grève--he shrieked: "Kate! Kate! I have seen him! He forgives! He is a prisoner in----" and fell back, dying, into the executioner's arms. The frenzied brain had failed at last. CHAPTER XXVII. AFAR OFF STILL. Kate had been, as already stated, far from well of late; the horrible revelation of that snowy morning brought her near to death's door; and, after she had been taken back to the Prince's house in a prostrate condition and put at once to bed, her life was for some weeks despaired of. Meanwhile she was carefully ministered to by all the Scotch ladies who formed a part of the establishment, and also by Lady Ames, who refused under any circumstances to quit Paris; though, indeed, her indulgent husband did not press her to do so. "The King," she said, "may call me a Jacobite, may even prosecute me for one when I return to London, yet I shall not leave Lady Fordingbridge now--no, not even if I have to become an inmate of Charles Edward's house. Oh, the horror of seeing one's husband brought out to such a doom, villain though he was; the horror of it! How shall she ever recover from such a catastrophe?" "How, indeed?" replied Sir Charles, who, worldling though he was, had been as terribly shocked as she at the end of Fordingbridge's career. "Yet it might have been worse. It was a merciful providence that saw fit to end his life at the moment it did. Think, only think, if, added to all else, she had seen his head fall, as she would have done had he not died at the instant!" Lady Ames nodded her head reflectively as she agreed with him; then a few moments later she said, speaking from the deep _fauteuil_ in which she was sitting in their lodgings, which they had now taken on the Quai des Théatins so as to be near her: "You heard his last words?--'I have seen him. He forgives. He is a prisoner in----' and then died before he could conclude. What, Charles, do you think they pointed to?" Sir Charles shrugged his shoulders; then he asked significantly, "What does _she_ think they pointed to?" "Alas!" his wife replied, "she does not refer to them; seems scarcely to have heard them uttered, or, if she did, not to have understood them. Remember, she is but a woman, and, although it is impossible she should regret his death, the horror, the shame of it, has broken her down completely. She longed--any woman would long--to be free of a man who had deceived her from the first as he had done, yet no woman could desire her freedom should come in such an awful form. They say," she continued, sinking her voice to an awestruck whisper, "that he died of fright upon that scaffold."