“Will you forgive me, Ray?” he asked brokenly. “I had to do this. I was forced to do it. I starved before I did it. I came once . . . out of curiosity to help the executioner—a broken-down doctor, who had taken on the work. And he was ill . . . I hanged the murderer. I had just come from the medical school. It didn’t seem so dreadful to me then. I tried to find some other way of making money, and lived in dread all my life that somebody would point his finger at me, and say: ‘There goes Benn, the executioner.’” “Benn, the executioner!” said Ray wonderingly. “Are you Benn?” The old man nodded. “Benn, come out! I give you my word of honour that I will postpone the execution until to-morrow. You can’t stay there.” John Bennett looked round at the grating, then up to the cut rope. The execution could not proceed. Such was the routine of death that the rope must be expressly issued from the headquarter gaol. No other rope would serve. All the paraphernalia of execution, down to the piece of chalk that marks the “T” on the trap where a man must put his feet, must be punctiliously forwarded from prison headquarters, and as punctiliously returned. John shot back the bolts, opened the door and stepped out. The faces of the men in the condemned cell were ghastly. The Governor’s was white and drawn, the prison doctor seemed to have shrunk, and the Sheriff sat on the bed, his face hidden in his hands. “I will telegraph to London and tell them the circumstances,” said the Governor. “I’m not condemning you for what you’re doing, Benn. It would be monstrous to expect you to have done—this thing.” A warder came along the corridor and through the door of the cell. And behind him, entering the prison by virtue of his authority, a dishevelled, dust-stained, limping figure, his face scratched, streaks of dried blood on his face, his eyes red with weariness. For a second John Bennett did not recognize him, and then: “A reprieve, by the King’s own hand,” said Dick Gordon unsteadily, and handed the stained envelope to the Governor. CHAPTER XXXIX THE AWAKENING THROUGHOUT the night Ella Bennett lay, half waking, half sleeping. She remembered the doctor coming; she remembered Elk’s urgent request that she should drink the draught he had prepared; and though she had suspected its nature and at first had fought against drinking that milky-white potion, she had at last succumbed, and had lain down on the sofa, determined that she would not sleep until she knew the worst or the best. She was exhausted with the mental fight she had put up to preserve her sanity, and then she had dozed. She was dimly conscious, as she came back to understanding, that she was lying on a bed, and that somebody had taken off her shoes and loosened her hair. With a tremendous effort she opened her eyes and saw a woman, sitting by a window, reading. The room was intensely masculine; it smelt faintly of smoke.