“The moment I could,” I said, trembling, “I begged your life. It is the dearest of all I know to me. Are you going to punish me for that?” Still no answer. “O!” I said, with a little rally to anger, “if you will not thank me, at least you might say whether or not you received my enclosure this morning?” “The money?” he muttered. “Yes, I received it.” I was moved to a little agitated laughter. “Is everything poisonous that comes from my hands? If you had spent a little of it on food and clothes, my obligation to you would not have been the less.” “I thought you sent it to me to pay your debts.” “What debts?” Again that grim silence. I feared him more than I can tell; feared him so much that no thought of the conquering guile by which I had once been wont to sway him occurred to me to use. I shivered, and drew my cloak faster about me, and hurried by his side without another word. Whither was he bent? By the roaring quays, it seemed, towards the dark prison from which, only a few hours earlier, she had gone to her self-elected doom. “Not there!” I sobbed, struggling--“not there! What good can it do now?” But he turned, short of reaching it, to his left, into a street leading to the great square adjoining, where the gallows was erected; and here, under the shadow of the fortress, stood a church with a lofty tower. Stopping at a door which opened into the base of this last, he tapped three times; and in a moment it yawned, and engulfed us, and the tumult of the living town was become in our ears like the murmur of the sea in a dead cavern. Our guide, taper in hand, went on before us. The sound of our footsteps reeled and laughed behind, echoing up to unknown altitudes. Ward of that little star of radiance, I had no terror so great as that of its flashing away and committing me to the shadows that seemed always dancing and clutching for me outside its circumference. And then suddenly we were come to a narrow iron gate set in the stone, and to the cowled, motionless figure of a monk who stood thereby. Without a word uttered by this spectre, the folds of its robe contracted, and a long white hand was thrust forth palm upwards. Gogo put a purse into it. “Bear witness, Diana,” he said, in a low voice, that boomed and clanged among the stones, “that I deliver the account of my stewardship to the last penny.” I was sobbing dreadfully, moved by some terror that had in it, nevertheless, no thought of evil intended by him to myself. “You will take nothing from me?” I gasped. He addressed the monk. “It is enough?” The cowled head bent. “Then let us through, father, and alone.” The grate clanked. He gripped my arm, and, seizing the taper from the sacristan, led me down a long flight of steps, through a low doorway, into a crypt. And there, on the damp ground, full in our view, was something lying, and a sheet over. “No, no!” I screamed. “You have tortured me enough already!”