I stood now in the open jaws of my own destruction, where the slightest false movement, or ill-judged word, upon his part or my own, must mean betrayal; where an awakening of suspicion in the simple mind of the sentry without, or of his captain in the corridor; the return to consciousness, or chance discovery, of the bound priest upon the upper deck, would ruin every hope, sentencing me to a fate no less speedy or certain than that which now awaited him I sought to serve.

All this had I risked that I might aid in the escape of the one and only man in all the wide world who stood between me and the woman I loved.
It was an odd position, a heartless caprice of fate.

I felt the full measure of its strangeness, yet the thought never occurred to me of shrinking back from duty, nor slightest dream of realizing a personal victory through any act of baseness.

I was not there for his sake, or my own, but to redeem my pledged word to her whose slightest wish was law, whose pleading face forever rose before me.

Nevertheless, as I stood fronting him for the first time, there was little except bitter hatred in my heart--hatred which, no doubt, burned for the instant within my eyes,--but a hatred which never returned, to curse my memory, from that day unto this.