“And you tended me? You?” Incredulous amazement lent strength to his enfeebled voice. “Did not you tend me?” she answered him. He made a gesture of repudiation with one of his hands, grown so pale and thin. Then he sighed and smiled contentedly. “God is very good to me a sinner. As I lay here now all that I craved was that you, knowing the full truth of my villainy, of the temptation by which I fell, should speak a little word of pity and forgiveness to me to ... to make my dying easier.” “Your dying? Why do you talk of death?” “Because it comes, by the mercy of God. To die of the plague is what I most deserve. I sought it and it fled before me. Yet in the end I stumbled upon it by chance. All my life is it thus that things have come to me. That which I desire and pursue eludes me. When I cease the pursuit, it turns and takes me unawares. In all things have I been the sport of Fortune; even in my dying, as it seems.” She would have interrupted, but he hurried on, deceived by his own weakness. “Listen a moment yet, lest I go before I have said what is yet to add to the letter that I left for you. I swear, by my last feeble hope of heaven, that I did not know it was you I was to carry off, else I had gone to the hangman before ever I had lent myself to the Duke’s business. You believe me?” “There is no need for your assurances, Randal. I never doubted that. How could I?” “How could you? Aye, that is true. You could not. So much, at least, would not have been possible, however I might have fallen.” Then he looked at her with piteous eyes. “I scarce dare hope that you’ll forgive me all....” “But I do, Randal. I do. I have long since forgiven you. I gave you my forgiveness and my gratitude when I knew what you had done for me, how you risked your life in reparation. If I could forgive you then, can I harbour resentment now that I know all? I do forgive--freely, utterly, completely, Randal dear.” “Say it again,” he implored her. She said it, weeping quietly. “Then I am content. What matter all my unrealized dreams of crowned knight-errantry, all my high-flown ambitions? To this must I have come in the end. I was a fool not to have taken the quiet good to which I was born. Then might we have been happy, Nan, and neither of us would have felt the need to seek the hollow triumphs of the world.” “You talk as if you were to die,” she reproved him through her tears. “But you shall get well again.” “That surely were a crowning folly when I may die so happily.” And then the doctor supervened to interrupt them, and to confirm circumstantially her assertion that Holles was now out of danger.