She paused, locking her hands before her, looking at him in an agony of entreaty. When she had fled from the court-room to the open air, she had walked straight away toward the mountain, struggling in the cool wind and motion against the feeling of physical sickness and anguish. But she had only partly regained her self-possession. Returning, the thinning groups about the dim-lit door had made it clear that the session was over. In her painful confusion of mind she had acted on a peremptory impulse that drove her to the jail, where her face had quickly gained her entrance. "Surely, surely," she went on, "the man you are protecting has had time enough! Hasn't he? Won't you tell them the truth now?" He knew not how to meet the piteous reproach and terror of that look. She had not heard the street preacher's declaration, he knew, but even if she had, it would have been to her only an echo of the old mooted likeness. He had given her comfort once--but this was no more to be. No matter what it meant to him, or to her! "Jessica," he said steadily, "when you came to me here that first day, and I told you not to fear for me, I did not mean to deceive you. I thought then that it would all come right. But something has happened since then--something that makes a difference. I can not tell who was the murderer of Moreau. I can not tell you or any one else, either now or at any time." She gazed at him startled. She had a sudden conception of some element hitherto unguessed in his make-up, something inveterate and adamant. Could it be that he did not intend to tell at all? The very idea was monstrous! Yet that clearly was his meaning. She looked at him with flashing eyes. "You mean you will not?" she exclaimed bitterly. "You are bent on sacrificing yourself, then! You are going to take this risk because you think it brave and noble, because somehow it fits your man's gospel! Can't you see how wicked and selfish it is? You are thinking only of him, and of yourself, not of me!" "Jessica, Jessica!" he protested with a groan. But in the self-torture of her questionings she paid no heed. "Don't you think I suffer? Haven't I borne enough in the months since I married you, for you to want to save me this? Do you owe me nothing, me whom you so wronged, whose--" She stopped suddenly at the look on his face of mortal pain, for she had struck harder than she knew. It pierced through the fierce resentment to her deepest heart, and all her love and pity gushed back upon her in a torrent. She threw herself on her knees by the bare cot, crying passionately: "Oh, forgive me! Forget what I said! I did not mean it. I have forgiven you a thousand times over. I never ceased to love you. I love you now, more than all the world."