The last week arrived.  Wharton’s letters grew more uncertain and despondent; the Radical press fought on with added heat as the cause became more desperate.  On Monday the wife went to see the condemned man, who told her not to be so silly as to imagine there was any hope.  Tuesday night, Wharton asked his last question in Parliament.  Friday was the day fixed for the execution.

The question in Parliament came on late.  The Home Secretary’s answer, though not final in form, was final in substance.  Wharton went out immediately and wrote to Marcella.  “She will not sleep if I telegraph to-night,” he thought, with that instinct for detail, especially for physical detail, which had in it something of the woman.  But, knowing that his letter could not reach her by the early post with the stroke of eight next morning, he sent out his telegram, that she might not learn the news first from the papers.

Marcella had wandered out before breakfast, feeling the house an oppression, and knowing that, one way or another, the last news might reach her any hour.

She had just passed through the little wood behind and alongside of the house, and was in a field beyond, when she heard some one running behind her.  William handed her the telegram, his own red face full of understanding.  Marcella took it, commanded herself till the boy was out of sight and hearing again, then sank down on the grass to read it.

“All over.  The Home Secretary’s official refusal to interfere with sentence sent to Widrington to-day.  Accept my sorrow and sympathy.”

She crushed it in her hand, raising her head mechanically.  Before her lay that same shallow cup of ploughed land stretching from her father’s big wood to the downs, on the edge of which Hurd had plied his ferrets in the winter nights.  But to-day the spring worked in it, and breathed upon it.  The young corn was already green in the furrows; the hazel-catkins quivered in the hedge above her; larks were in the air, daisies in the grass, and the march of sunny clouds could be seen in the flying shadows they flung on the pale greens and sheeny purples of the wide treeless basin.

Human helplessness, human agony—­set against the careless joy of nature—­there is no new way of feeling these things.  But not to have felt them, and with the mad, impotent passion and outcry which filled Marcella’s heart at this moment, is never to have risen to the full stature of our kind.

* * * * *

“Marcella, it is my strong wish—­my command—­that you do not go out to the village to-night.”

“I must go, papa.”

It was Thursday night—­the night before the Friday morning fixed for Hurd’s execution.  Dinner at Mellor was just over.  Mr. Boyce, who was standing in front of the fire, unconsciously making the most of his own inadequate height and size, looked angrily at his stately daughter.  She had not appeared at dinner, and she was now dressed in the long black cloak and black hat she had worn so constantly in the last few weeks.  Mr. Boyce detested the garb.