When Jack brought home the watch, I was seized with a shuddering presentiment, and I would have given the world to throw it out of the window.  But I could not bear to see him pinched with hunger, and he had already tossed the doctor’s eighteenpence to a beggar woman.  So I trudged off to the pawnbroker’s, to get what price I could, and I bethought me that none would know me for what I was so far away as Oxford Street.  But the monster behind the counter had a quick suspicion, though I swear I looked as innocent as a babe; he discovered the owner of the watch, and infamously followed me to my house.

’The next day we were both arrested, and once more we stood in the hot, stifling Court of the Old Bailey.  Jack was radiant as ever, the one spot of colour and gaiety in that close, sodden atmosphere.  When we were taken from Bow Street a thousand people formed our guard of honour, and for a month we were the twin wonders of London.  The lightest word, the fleetest smile of the renowned highwayman, threw the world into a fit of excitement, and a glimpse of Rann was worth a king’s ransom.  I could look upon him all day for nothing!  And I knew what a fever of fear throbbed behind his mask of happy contempt.  Yet bravely he played the part unto the very end.  If the toasts of London were determined to gaze at him, he assured them they should have a proper salve for their eyes.  So he dressed himself as a light-hearted sportsman.  His coat and waistcoat were of pea-green cloth; his buckskin breeches were spotlessly new, and all tricked out with the famous strings; his hat was bound round with silver cords; and even the ushers of the Court were touched to courtesy.  He would whisper to me, as we stood in the dock, “Cheer up, my girl.  I have ordered the best supper that Covent Garden can provide, and we will make merry to-night when this foolish old judge has done his duty.”  The supper was never eaten.  Through the weary afternoon we waited for acquittal.  The autumn sun sank in hopeless gloom.  The wretched lamps twinkled through the jaded air of the court-house.  In an hour I lived a thousand years of misery, and when the sentence was read, the words carried no sense to my withered brain.  It was only in my cell I realised that I had seen Jack Rann for the last time; that his pea-green coat would prove a final and ineffaceable memory.

’Alas!  I, who had never been married, was already a hempen widow; but I was too hopelessly heartbroken for my lover’s fate to think of my own paltry hardship.  I never saw him again.  They told me that he suffered at Tyburn like a man, and that he counted upon a rescue to the very end.  They told me (still bitterer news to hear) that two days before his death he entertained seven women at supper, and was in the wildest humour.  This almost broke my heart; it was an infidelity committed on the other side of the grave.  But, poor Jack, he was a good lad, and loved me more than them all, though he never