Mr. Dunbar laid on the bench a small package sealed in yellow paper.

“Knowing that your detention here has necessarily forfeited all the industrial engagements by which you maintained yourself, before you came South, I have been requested to ask your acceptance of this purse, which contains sufficient money to defray your expenses until you resume your art labors.  It is an offering from your twelve jurors.”

“No—­no.  I could never touch it.  Tell them for me that I am not vindictive.  I know they did the best they could for me, in view of the evidence.  Tell them I am grateful for their offer, but I cannot accept it.  I—­”

“You imagine I am one of the generous contributors?  Be easy; I have not offered you a cent.  I am merely the bearer of the gift, or rather the attempt at restitution.  Your refusal will grieve them, and add to the pangs of regret that very justly afflict them at present.”

“I have some money which Doctor Grantlin collected for my Christmas card.  He retained only a portion of the amount, and sent me the remainder.  Mr. Singleton keeps it for me, and it is all that I need now.”

“The purse contains also a ticket to New York, as it has been supposed that you would desire to return there at once.”

“Take all back, with my earnest thanks.  I prefer to owe X—­only the remembrance of the great kindness which some few have shown me.  The officers here have been uniformly considerate and courteous to me; Mr. and Mrs. Singleton will ever be very dear to me for numberless kind deeds; and Sister Serena was a staff of strength during that frightful black week of the trial.”

She paused, and her voice betrayed something of the tumult at her heart, as while a sudden wave of scarlet overflowed her cheeks, she rose and held out both hands.

“Mr. Dunbar, if I have seemed unappreciative of your great exertions in my behalf, it is merely because there are some matters which I can never explain in this world.  One thing I ask you to believe when I am gone.  I will never, so long as I live, cease to remember the debt I owe you.  I am and shall be inexpressibly grateful to you, and whenever I think of my terrible sojourn here, be sure I shall recall tenderly—­oh! how tenderly! the two friends who trusted and believed in my innocence, when all the world denounced me; the two who generously clung to me when public opinion branded me as an outcast--you two—­my best friends, you and Miss Gordon.  It makes me proud and happy to know in this hour of my vindication, that in her, and in your good opinion, I needed none.  Out of your united lives, let me pass as a fleeting gray shadow.”

“Out of my life you can never pass.  Into it you have brought disappointment, humiliation, and a keenness of suffering such as I never imagined I was capable of enduring; and some recompense I will have.  You hope to plunge into the vortex of a great city, where you can elude observation and obliterate all traces.  Do not cherish the ghost of such a delusion.  Go where you may, but I give you fair warning, you cannot escape me; and the day you meet that guilty vagabond, you betray him to the scouts of justice.”