“I know, I know,” Elithe answered her; “I had to tell what I saw. But it was an accident. He did not mean to do it.” “Why, then, does he not say so? Why persist in a falsehood when the truth might save him?” Clarice asked in a tone of voice which roused Elithe, and no lawyer defending his client was ever more eloquent than she was in her defense of Paul and her entreaty for Clarice to see him. “If you ever loved him, you must love him now more than ever, when he needs it so much, and if he were free or in a foreign land you would still marry him,” she said. Clarice shook her head. “You must hold peculiar ideas,” she said, “if you think I could marry one who killed my brother. I have thought it all over,—again and again,—during these wretched days. Don’t imagine I have not suffered, for I have. Think of the crushing blow which fell when I was so happy and expected to be happier, and all through Paul. I have loved him. I suppose I love him still, but can never be his wife. I am sorry for him. I hope he will escape justice and would help him if I could. I find myself weakening now as I talk to you, and dare not trust myself to see him. You say he often sits in the look-out. Tell him to be there to-morrow when the boat goes out. There will not be many on it, and I will wave him a God bless you and good-bye.” “Is that all?” Elithe asked, rising to go. It seemed as if Clarice wavered a moment, her love for Paul tugging at her heart and fighting with her pride, which conquered. “That is all,” she said, “except good-bye to you, in whom I must always be interested because Jack loved you.” She held out her hand, which Elithe took mechanically and dropped quickly. She did not like to be reminded of Jack’s love. It hurt her almost as much as the message she was taking to Paul, who was waiting anxiously for her. CHAPTER XL. FAREWELL. “What did she say? Is she coming? Did she send me a note?” Paul asked eagerly, knowing the answer before Elithe could give it. He was in the Smuggler’s room, which, luxuriously as it had been fitted up, was a prison still. All the world was a prison and would be as long as he lived as he was living now. “I can’t bear it much longer. I believe I’d rather die or work in the convict’s garb, with the hope of being eventually free,” he had said many a time, with a growing conviction that he should ultimately give himself up in spite of his mother’s assertions that the real culprit would in time be found, or he gotten out of the country to a foreign land, where she and his father would join him, and, perhaps, Clarice.