The low voice failed. There had been in the hesitant words failing pride and shame, mingled with the love that had been so long denied--a revelation which welled from the pure, outspoken honesty of heart that compelled it, demanding, at all odds, so far as he was concerned, openness and understanding. The shaken voice, the tremulous lips, the moon-soft fire of her eyes and the faint scent of her clothing, all the sweet suggestions of her presence were crying aloud to Harry, tempting him with a vision of promise. What if she had failed him--then? What if that courage he had dreamed, put to the touch, had shown but cowardice, that love of him a secondary thing to her? She was what he wanted--to yield himself to her arms as a swimmer to the sea! As much as she loved any one--save herself--she loved him! Was not a half loaf better than no bread? The icy barrier of reserve which he had reared crumbled down, and he felt the thing he had tried to imprison leap up, savage and not to be denied. His groping hand went out and touched her arm. "Echo!" he whispered hoarsely. "Echo--" His voice died in his throat. Her hands in her lap held the theatrical programme, and words in heavy black-letter--the title of the piece--were staring up at him from the white paper-- THE JAILBIRD In the shadow, he felt his limbs suddenly trembling. With a kind of fascination his gaze, for the first time since his entrance, lifted to the stage. It was set as a long flagged corridor of vertical steel bars, into which doors were let at regular intervals, and behind each door showed a bare, forbidding room, furnished with two iron cots, one above the other, and two wooden stools. As he gazed in consternation, a bell clangored and along the corridor came tramping a line of men clad in dingy stripes, pallid face close to shabby shoulder, one knee rising and falling to the damnable rhythm of the prison lock-step. Harry felt an algid chill creep over him. He sat upright, his whole body rigid, each detail of the significant picture stamping itself upon his quivering perception. Midway of the line a turnkey unlocked a door in the barred wall and two links of the human chain detached themselves and entered--one stooped and crafty and cringing; the other clean-cut and erect with no stamp of vice upon his face. The clanging bolt shot home, the line moved off. Then, in the silence of the house the comely figure leaned against the bars, and John Stark's voice--or was it his, Harry Sevier's?--cried in broken agony: "And I am innocent--innocent!" As the curtain descended on the act, amid a crash of orchestral music, Mrs. Spottiswoode turned to Harry with a little shrug. "It _is_ moving, really, isn't it? But how _terribly_ unnatural! Of course in real life nothing like that could happen to an innocent man. What do you think, Mr. Treadwell?"