The following evening Walter obtained admittance to the condemned cell.

“Eugene Aram,” he said, in tones of agony, “if at this moment you can lay your hand on your heart, and say, ’Before God, and at peril of my soul, I am innocent of this deed,’ I will depart; I will believe you, and bear as I may the reflection that I have been one of the unconscious agents in condemning to a fearful death an innocent man.  But if you cannot at so dark a crisis take that oath, then, oh then, be generous, even in guilt, and let me not be haunted through life by the spectre of a ghastly and restless doubt!”

On the eve of the day destined to be his last on earth Eugene Aram placed in Walter’s hands a paper which that young man pledged himself not to read till Rowland Lester’s grey hairs had gone to the grave.  This document set forth at length the story of Aram’s early life, how he sought knowledge amidst grinding poverty, and how, when a gigantic discovery in science gleamed across his mind, a discovery which only lack of means prevented him from realising to the vast benefit of truth and man, the tempter came to him.  This tempter took the form of a distant relative, Richard Houseman, with his doctrine that “Laws order me to starve, but self-preservation is an instinct more sacred than society,” and his demand for co-operation in an act of robbery from one Daniel Clarke, whose crimes were many, who was, moreover, on the point of disappearing with a number of jewels he had borrowed on false pretences.

“Houseman lied,” wrote the condemned man.  “I did not strike the blow.  I never designed a murder.  But the deed was done, and Houseman divided the booty.  My share he buried in the earth, leaving me to withdraw it when I chose.  There, perhaps, it lies still.  I never touched what I had murdered my own life to gain.  Three days after that deed a relative, who had neglected me in life, died and left me wealth—­wealth, at least, to me!  Wealth greater than that for which I had——­My ambition died in remorse!”

Houseman passed away in his own bed.  But he had to be buried secretly in the dead of night, for, ten years after Eugene Aram had died on the scaffold, the hatred of the world survived for his accomplice.  Rowland Lester did not live long after Madeline’s death.  But when Walter returned from a period of honourable service with the great Frederick of Prussia, it was with no merely cousinly welcome that Ellinor received him.

* * * * *

The Last Days of Pompeii

“The Last Days of Pompeii,” the most popular of Lytton’s historical romances, was begun and almost completed at Naples in the winter of 1832-3, and was first published in 1834.  The period dealt with is that of 79 A.D., during the short reign of Titus, when Rome was at its zenith and the picturesque Campanian city a kind of Rome-by-the-Sea.  Lytton wrote the