I glanced over the police news:—­’Uttering forged Bank-of-England notes, knowing them to be forged;’ I exclaimed, “The devil!”

“There’s no occasion to be spurting that name out so loudly, Mr. Sharp,” said Mrs. Davies with some asperity, “especially in a lawyer’s office.  People have been wrongfully accused before to-day, I suppose?”

I was intent on the report, and not answering, she continued, “I heard nothing of it till I read the shameful account in the paper half an hour agone.  The poor slandered girl was, I dare say, afraid or ashamed to send for me.”

“This appears to be a very bad case, Mrs. Davies,” I said at length.  “Three forged ten-pound notes changed in one day at different shops each time, under the pretence of purchasing articles of small amount, and another ten-pound note found in her pocket!  All that has, I must say, a very ugly look.”

“I don’t care,” exclaimed Mrs. Davies quite fiercely, “if it looks as ugly as sin, or if the whole Bank of England was found in her pocket!  I know Jane Eccles well; she nursed me last spring through the fever; and I would be upon my oath that the whole story, from beginning to end, is an invention of the devil, or something worse.”

“Jane Eccles,” I persisted, “appears to have been unable or unwilling to give the slightest explanation as to how she became possessed of the spurious notes.  Who is this brother of hers, ’of such highly respectable appearance,’ according to the report, who was permitted a private interview with her previous to the examination?”

“She has no brother that I have ever heard of,” said Mrs. Davies.  “It must be a mistake of the papers.”

“That is not likely.  You observed of course that she was fully committed—­and no wonder!”

Mrs. Davies’s faith in the young woman’s integrity was not to be shaken by any evidence save that of her own bodily eyes, and I agreed to see Jane Eccles on the morrow, and make the best arrangements for the defence—­at Mrs. Davies’ charge—­which the circumstances and the short time I should have for preparation—­the Old Bailey session would be on in a few days—­permitted.  The matter so far settled, Mrs. Margaret hurried off to see what had become of little Henry, the prisoner’s nephew.

I visited Jane Eccles the next day in Newgate.  She was a well-grown young woman of about two or three-and-twenty—­not exactly pretty perhaps, but very well-looking.  Her brown hair was plainly worn, without a cap, and the expression of her face was, I thought, one of sweetness and humility, contradicted in some degree by rather harsh lines about the mouth, denoting strong will and purpose.  As a proof of the existence of this last characteristic, I may here mention that, when her first overweening confidence had yielded to doubt, she, although dotingly fond of her nephew, at this time about eight years of age, firmly refused to see him, “in order,” she once said to me—­and