Mr. Jelnik placed the candles in the empty sconces.  We two stood looking down, he with pity, I with a mounting, sick horror, at the thing before us—­the poor, huddled thing that had lain there so long.  For it was not, as one might suppose at first glance, a frayed and threadbare mantle flung across one corner of the table.  By the long black hair it was a woman, and a young woman.

She had on what must once have been a most beautiful brown silk dress, trimmed with quantities of fine lace, and looped up over a stiff brocaded petticoat.  Her skeleton feet were in the smallest of low-cut shoes, the tarnished silver buckles of which were set with rhinestones.  Her head rested on her arm, outflung across the table.  The other arm hung limp, and the fingers pointed downward, as if accusingly.  She had quantities of glorious black hair, and this alone had death respected; nothing else of her loveliness remained.  Under her fleshless hand lay the soiled and yellowed papers she had written, and over which, in biting mockery, she had kept watch and ward.

“Who is it?  Oh, God, God!—­who is it?” I gasped, and heard my voice rattling in my throat like a dying woman’s.  As, perhaps her voice had rattled, here in the dark.  The thought of her, sitting here in awful loneliness these long, long years, while life, all unknowing, ebbed and flowed within reach of her, made me shudder.

“It is Jessamine Hynds, lost Jessamine Hynds,” said her kinsman of a later day, looking down upon the wreck of her with compassion.

“But how—­how—­why did she come here?  To die thus—­Oh, my God! my God!”

“I saw the papers under her hand, and her name written upon the first page,” he said.  “What further things she has written, I do not know.  I waited, Sophy, until we should read it together.”  He smiled at me wanly.  “I could bear it better, with you beside me.  You see how much I need you!” And he took the papers from her and spread them upon the table.  What she had written I shall insert here, as its properest place.

I, Jessamine Hynds, Gentlewoman, being of sound Mind (though they do say I am mad) but of infirm Body, the which I am shortly to be rid of, do state and declare before God that it was I who did take the Hynds Jewells, being help’d thereto by black Shooba the witch doctor, who was my father’s man before my Uncle James Bought him at the Publick Outcry of our Effects.

     As to the Why & Wherefore I have act’d thus, thou knowest,
     thou cruel God, who made me a beggar’d Orphan, a poor
     dependant in this House of Pride!

Yet, God, thou knoweth I lov’d them well enow until Richard came home the last Time from Abroad, a Young Man in the Beauty of his Youth, who saw not Jessamine the poor Cozzen, but Jessamine the fair woman.  He would have me sing him Ballads, he would hang Entranc’d upon the Spinet when I play’d.  Now would he fetch me a flower for my hair, placing of