"Fool! fool!--damnable fool that I was" (and in his sudden rage he clenched his own flesh till the nails met in it); "had I but got to France one day sooner! Why don't you save me, save me, you whom I have banqueted and feasted, and lent money to! one word from you might have saved me; I will not die! I don't deserve it! I am innocent! I tell you, Not guilty, my lord,--not guilty! Have you no heart, no consciences? Murder! murder! murder!" and the wretched man sank upon the ground, and tried with his hands to grasp the stone floor, as if to cling to it from some imaginary violence. Turn we from him to the cell in which another criminal awaits also the awful coming of his latest morrow. Pale, motionless, silent, with his face bending over his bosom and hands clasped tightly upon his knees, Wolfe sat in his dungeon, and collected his spirit against the approaching consummation of his turbulent and stormy fate. His bitterest punishment had been already past; mysterious Chance, or rather the Power above chance, had denied to him the haughty triumph of self-applause. No sophistry, now, could compare his doom to that of Sidney, or his deed to the act of the avenging Brutus. Murder--causeless, objectless, universally execrated--rested, and would rest (till oblivion wrapped it) upon his name. It had appeared, too, upon his trial, that he had, in the information he had received, been the mere tool of a spy in the ministers' pay; and that, for weeks before his intended deed, his design had been known, and his conspiracy only not bared to the public eye because political craft awaited a riper opportunity for the disclosure. He had not then merely been the blind dupe of his own passions, but, more humbling still, an instrument in the hands of the very men whom his hatred was sworn to destroy. Not a wreck, not a straw, of the vain glory for which he had forfeited life and risked his soul, could he hug to a sinking heart, and say, "This is my support."