But wasn't that the right way--for sharing his last day of captivity with the man one adored?
It was every moment more and more for her as if she were waiting with him in his prison--waiting with some gleam of remembrance of how noble captives in the French Revolution, the darkness of the Terror, used to make a feast, or a high discourse, of their last poor resources.

If she had broken with everything now, every observance of all the past months, she must simply then take it so--take it that what she had worked for was too near, at last, to let her keep her head.

She might have been losing her head verily in her husband's eyes--since he didn't know, all the while, that the sudden freedom of her words was but the diverted intensity of her disposition personally to seize him.

He didn't know, either, that this was her manner--now she was with him--of beguiling audaciously the supremacy of suspense.

For the people of the French Revolution, assuredly, there wasn't suspense; the scaffold, for those she was thinking of, was certain--whereas what Charlotte's telegram announced was, short of some incalculable error, clear liberation.