“For Heaven’s sake release him from that embrace!” cried the mother, who knew that her son was smitten to death.  “If all be true that the maid hath said, he is not fit to die, and that embrace is a deadly one!—­O my son, my son! come back, come back!

“Mercy on us, here is the watch!  We are undone!”

Indeed the trampling of many hasty feet announced the arrival of a number of persons upon the scene.  It seemed like enough to be the constables or the watch; but the moment the newcomers appeared round the corner, Dorcas, uttering a little shriek of joy and relief, threw herself upon the foremost man, who was in fact none other than Reuben himself—­Reuben, followed closely by his brother Dan, and they by several young roisterers, the boon companions of Frederick.

It had chanced that almost as soon as Dorcas had run from Lady Scrope’s door, hotly pursued by Frederick, her brothers had come up to fetch her thence.  It was also part of that worthy’s plan that they should hear she had been carried off, though not by himself.  His half-tipsy comrades, therefore, who had come to see the sport, immediately informed the young men that the maid had been pursued by a Scourer in such and such a direction; and so quickly had the brothers pursued the flying footsteps of the pair—­guided by the footmarks in the dusty and untrodden streets—­that they had come upon this strange and ghastly scene almost at its commencement, and in a moment their practised eyes took in what had happened.

The open door marked with the ominous red cross, the troubled face of the watchman, the ghastly apparition of the delirious plague-stricken man, the horror depicted in the face of the mother—­all this told a tale of its own.  Scenes of a like kind were now growing common enough in the city; but this was more terrible to the young men from the fact that the face of the unhappy and half-fainting Frederick was known to them and that they understood the awful peril into which this adventure had thrown him.  They knew the strength of delirious patients, and the peril of contagion in their touch.  To attempt to loosen that bearlike clasp might be death to any who attempted it.

Reuben looked about him, still holding his sister in his arms as though to keep her away from the peril; and Dan, who had taken one step forward towards the sheeted spectre, paused and muttered between his teeth: 

“The hound! he has but got his deserts!”

“True,” said Reuben, for he was certain now that it had been Frederick who was Dorcas’s pursuer; “yet we must not leave him thus.  He will be strangled or choked by the pestilential smell if we cannot get him away.  Take Dorcas, Dan.  Let me see if I can do aught with him.”

But even as Reuben spoke, and Dorcas clung closer than ever to him in fear that he was about to adventure himself into greater peril, the delirious man suddenly flung Frederick from him, so that he fell upon the pavement almost as one dead; and then, with a hideous shriek that rang in their ears for long, fled back to the house as rapidly as he had left it, and fell down dead a few moments later upon the bed from which he had so lately risen.