Letters began to come to our rooms from Mary, at first begging Brandon to come to her, and then upbraiding him because of his coldness and cowardice, and telling him that if he cared for her as she did for him, he would see her, though he had to wade through fire and blood.  That was exactly where the trouble lay; it was not fire and blood through which he would have to pass; they were small matters, mere nothings that would really have added zest and interest to the achievement.  But the frowning laugh of the tyrant, who could bind him hand and foot, and a vivid remembrance of the Newgate dungeon, with a dangling noose or a hollowed-out block in the near background, were matters that would have taken the adventurous tendency out of even the cracked brain of chivalry itself.  Brandon cared only to fight where there was a possible victory or ransom, or a prospect of some sort, at least, of achieving success.  Bayard preferred a stone wall, and thought to show his brains by beating them out against it, and in a sense he could do it. * * * What a pity this senseless, stiff-kneed, light-headed chivalry did not beat its brains out several centuries before Bayard put such an absurd price upon himself.

So every phase of the question which his good sense presented told Brandon, whose passion was as ardent though not so impatient as Mary’s, that it would be worse than foolhardy to try to see her.  He, however, had determined to see her once more before he left, but as it could, in all probability, be only once, he was reserving the meeting until the last, and had written Mary that it was their best and only chance.

This brought to Mary a stinging realization of the fact that Brandon was about to leave her and that she would lose him if something were not done quickly.  Now for Mary, after a life of gratified whims, to lose the very thing she wanted most of all—­that for which she would willingly have given up every other desire her heart had ever coined—­was a thought hardly to be endured.  She felt that the world would surely collapse.  It could not, would not, should not be.

Her vigorous young nerves were too strong to be benumbed by an overwhelming agony, as is sometimes the case with those who are fortunate enough to be weaker, so she had to suffer and endure.  Life itself, yes, life a thousand times, was slipping away from her.  She must be doing something or she would perish.  Poor Mary!  How a grand soul like hers, full of faults and weakness, can suffer!  What an infinite disproportion between her susceptibility to pain and her power to combat it!  She had the maximum capacity for one and the minimum strength for the other.  No wonder it drove her almost mad—­that excruciating pang of love.

She could not endure inaction, so she did the worst thing possible.  She went alone, one afternoon, just before dusk, to see Brandon at our rooms.  I was not there when she first went in, but, having seen her on the way, suspected something and followed, arriving two or three minutes after her.  I knew it was best that I should be present, and was sure Brandon would wish it.  When I entered they were holding each other’s hands, in silence.  They had not yet found their tongues, so full and crowded were their hearts.  It was pathetic to see them, especially the girl, who had not Brandon’s hopelessness to deaden the pain by partial resignation.