He was so young, so brave, so fine.
Why must Death have come to him when there was yet so much he might have
done? With his talent and education, with his wonderful spirit of
self-sacrifice, he might have gone far and high. Regretfully, she
recalled that he had loved her, and with kind pity in her heart she
reproached herself for not having been able to return to this fine,
clean, American youth the affection she had inspired in him.
Thomas Dean, she told herself, was the type of man she should have
loved, a man of her own people, with her own ideals, a man of her
country, her flag, and yet--
There on the floor, not a dozen feet away from her, shameful circlets of
steel girdling both his wrists and his ankles, lay the one man for whom
she knew now she cared the most in all the world, the man she had just
betrayed into Chief Fleck's hands.
Bitterly she reproached herself for not having tried to induce Frederic
to escape. In mental anguish she pictured him--the man she
loved--standing in the prisoner's dock in some courtroom, branded as a
spy, as a leader of spies, charged with an attempt to slaughter the
inhabitants--the women and children--of a sleeping, unprotected city.
With growing horror it came to her that in all probability she herself
would be called on to testify against him.
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