His voice gave the first sign of his own deep and painful feeling on the matter.  Marcella shivered.

“Then,” she said slowly, “Hurd will be executed.”

Lord Maxwell had a movement of impatience.

“Let me tell you,” he said, “that that does not follow at all.  There is some importance in signatures—­or rather in the local movement that the signatures imply.  It enables a case to be reopened, which, in any event, this case is sure to be.  But any Home Secretary who could decide a murder case on any other grounds whatever than those of law and his own conscience would not deserve his place a day—­an hour!  Believe me, you mistake the whole situation.”

He spoke slowly, with the sharp emphasis natural to his age and authority.  Marcella did not believe him.  Every nerve was beginning to throb anew with that passionate recoil against tyranny and prejudice, which was in itself an agony.

“And you say the same?” she said, turning to Aldous.

“I cannot sign that petition,” he said sadly.  “Won’t you try and believe what it costs me to refuse?”

It was a heavy blow to her.  Amply as she had been prepared for it, there had always been at the bottom of her mind a persuasion that in the end she would get her way.  She had been used to feel barriers go down before that ultimate power of personality of which she was abundantly conscious.  Yet it had not availed her here—­not even with the man who loved her.

Lord Maxwell looked at the two—­the man’s face of suffering, the girl’s struggling breath.

“There, there, Aldous!” he said, rising.  “I will leave you a minute.  Do make Marcella rest—­get her, for all our sakes, to forget this a little.  Bring her in presently to us for some coffee.  Above all, persuade her that we love her and admire her with all our hearts, but that in a matter of this kind she must leave us to do—­as before God!—­what we think right.”

He stood before her an instant, gazing down upon her with dignity—­nay, a certain severity.  Then he turned away and left the room.

Marcella sprang up.

“Will you order the carriage?” she said in a strangled voice.  “I will go upstairs.”

“Marcella!” cried Aldous; “can you not be just to me, if it is impossible for you to be generous?”

“Just!” she repeated, with a tone and gesture of repulsion, pushing him back from her. “You can talk of justice!”

He tried to speak, stammered, and failed.  That strange paralysis of the will-forces which dogs the man of reflection at the moment when he must either take his world by storm or lose it was upon him now.  He had never loved her more passionately—­but as he stood there looking at her, something broke within him, the first prescience of the inevitable dawned.