The man clung to her outstretched hand, and drew his head away from her, like a child that is shy, farther back into the pillows. His pale lips were seen to move, but any words they framed the landlord could not hear. Thereafter for a time he lay with closed eyes, pallid and helpless, whilst the woman knelt down by his side and buried her beautiful head in the coverlet of the bed. Presently she rose as one quickened by a sudden resolution. Tears she had not, but her eyes were filled with an anguish deeper even than the man’s. She crossed the room to where a broad settle stood with a tumbled heap of clothing upon it. The landlord observed, with a desperate dismay, that two cocked pistols lay there, whilst beside them was a case of embroidered leather. The lady opened this, and drew therefrom a dagger with a delicate point. Concealing this in her hand, perchance that the man might not see it, she approached the bed again. The landlord felt his limbs totter and begin to fail him, whilst his straining eyes seemed inclined to start from his head. What, in the name of the fiend, was the woman about to do? The man in the bed turned his eyes up to her; they had the look of a wounded animal. “Can it not stay?” he said, and his hoarse tone penetrated to the listener’s ears. “It can make no difference now; the game is played.” A sudden rush of tears appeared in the eyes of the woman; but the masterful quivering of her lips said clearly that she refused to admit them to be there. “Another day of this,” she said, “and all is over. Our only chance is to take it out before another hour goes by.” “Ay, and if you cut it out,” the sufferer gasped, “I am done with if ever man was.” “Nay, child; I will not have you say that,” she said, caressing his face with her unoccupied hand. The sweet imperious sorrow of her tone touched even the listener at the window, who, after all, was not a man of stone. Again the sufferer turned his face up to the woman and regarded her with the same dumb, dog-like look. She averted her gaze suddenly, as though she had not the fortitude to look at him. “Canst thou not trust me?” she said again. “I will be, oh! so gentle. And we dare not have a surgeon--dare we, child? Indeed, we dare not tarry. Thou art in a fever even now, and every hour it rises. It must be done now, mine own, or thou wilt not see to-morrow.” She spoke so wistfully that she might be beseeching her obdurate lord to gratify some feminine whim. He continued to regard her sickly and faintly, till at last a wan laugh crept upon his lips. It was the herald to the last desperate flicker of his courage--the courage that enables a man to look the mob in the eyes as he lays his neck on the block deliberately, delicately, and proudly. A fuller tone came into his hoarse, querulous voice. There was no longer complaint and petulance. The pettiness had gone out of it; it was almost a companion for the woman’s own.