He placed before his companion the miniature of Edith, which he took from his bosom, where he seemed carefully to treasure it.  He was again the envenomed and the excited savage which we have elsewhere seen him, and in which mood Munro knew well that nothing could be done with him in the shape of argument or entreaty.  He went on:—­

“Ask me no questions, Munro, so idle, so perfectly unnecessary as this.  Fortune has done handsomely here.  He falls through me, yet falls by the common hangman.  What a double blow is this to both of them.  I have been striving to imagine their feelings, and such a repast as that effort has procured me—­I would not exchange it—­no—­not for worlds—­for nothing less, Munro, than my restoration back to that society—­to that place in society, from which my fierce passions, and your cruel promptings, and the wrongs of society itself, have for ever exiled me.”

“And would you return, if you could do so?”

“To-morrow—­to-night—­this instant.  I am sanguinary, Munro—­revengeful—­fierce—­all that is bad, because I am not permitted to be better.  My pride, my strong feelings and deeply absorbing mood—­these have no other field for exercise.  The love of home, the high ambition, which, had society done me common justice, and had not, in enslaving itself, dishonored and defrauded me—­would, under other circumstances, have made me a patriot.  My pride is even now to command the admiration of men—­I never sought their love.  Their approbation would have made me fearless and powerful in their defence and for their rights—­their injustice makes me their enemy.  My passions, unprovoked and unexaggerated by mortifying repulses, would have only been a warm and stimulating influence, perpetually working in their service—­but, pressed upon and irritated as they have been they grew into so many wild beasts, and preyed upon the cruel or the careless keepers, whose gentle treatment and constant attention had tamed them into obedient servants.  Yet, would I could, even now, return to that condition in which there might be hope.  The true spectre of the criminal—­such as I am—­the criminal chiefly from the crimes and injustice of society, not forgetting the education of my boyhood, which grew out of the same crimes, and whose most dreadful lesson is selfishness—­is despair!  The black waters once past, the blacker hills rise between, and there is no return to those regions of hope, which, once lost, are lost for ever.  This is the true punishment—­the worst punishment which man inflicts upon his fellow—­the felony of public opinion.  The curse of society is no unfit illustration of that ban which its faith holds forth as the penal doom of the future.  There is no return!”

The dialogue, mixed up thus, throughout, with the utterance of opinions on the part of the outlaw, many of which were true or founded in truth, yet coupled with many false deductions—­was devoted, for some little while longer, to the discussion of their various necessities and plans for the future.  The night had considerably advanced in this way, when, of a sudden, their ears were assailed with an eldritch screech, like that of the owl, issuing from one of the several cells around them.