This was intimidation, and he knew it. He used it because he had a great end in view, and he saw no other way of gaining it. ‘Speak!’ he added. ‘Do you consent?’ A long pause, till she answered coldly, and turning, if possible, a shade paler than before: ‘Yes.’ ‘I thank you from my very soul,’ he answered, kissing first one and then the other of the cold nerveless hands he held. ‘And now I will leave you. You would prefer to be alone, I know. Good-night! Remember, all I am and have are at your service.’ She made no answer, and the deathly hue of her face never changed or altered. She did not reply to his good-night, nor take any notice of him, as he went out of the room. He found Ellen, and sent her into the room, saying: ‘I think your mistress will be ill. If she is, send for me. She will quite approve of it.’ Wondering, Ellen went into the sitting-room, and her heart echoed Falkenberg’s words when she saw her mistress. Ellen had come to feel that the most utter breakdown–fever, delirium, or raving–would be better than this prolonged conscious suffering. She could almost have found it in her heart to pray for death or madness to come and relieve her darling from this torture. ‘May he be paid his just wages!’ she kept wishing within herself, ‘measure for measure–not a grain more or less; and he’ll have had about as much as he can endure. I ask no more.’ The end of that long-drawn agony came at last, as come it must. After Falkenberg had gone, Sara began to pace about the room; once or twice the consciousness of what had passed between her and him, crossed her mind, and a vague accompanying idea, which scarcely attained the consistency of a positive intention–that when she was better, and better able to reason, she would tell him that she had made a mistake; that what he bargained for was out of the question; she would do him no such wrong. His threat of leaving her had been the last straw; she had been unable to face the alternative. She could not do without him; for in crises like these we see every day the adage belied that ‘vain is the help of man.’ It is man alone that can sustain and comfort man in such an emergency; it is then that there is brought home to us the utter powerlessness of supernatural aids to touch our woe. Ellen, in her room, towards morning, heard an abrupt pause in the measured footsteps, and something like a long moaned-out sigh. She hastened to the other room, and found that Sara had at last, dressed as she was, flung herself upon her bed, and lay there motionless. When Ellen spoke to her she murmured some incoherent words, but it was evident that she did not understand what was said to her.