I could not help it, when she moaned and wrung her hands, and said her mother’s heart would break.  I have heard all my life that justice is blind; I have learned to believe it, for it stumbles, and gropes, and lays iron claws on the wrong person.  As for the lawyers?  They are fit pilots:  and the courts are little better than blind man’s buff.  Don’t stand chewing your mustache, Ned.  Tell me what you want me to do, while baby is asleep.  She has a vexatious habit of taking cat naps.”

“Little woman, I turn over the case to you.  Just let your heart loose, and follow it.”

“If I do, will you endorse me?”

“Till the stars fall.”

“Can you stay here awhile?”

“Yes, if you will tell Jarvis where he can find me.”

“Mind you, Ned, you are not to interfere with me?”

“No—­I swear I won’t.  Hurry up, or there will be much music in this bleating fold; and you know I am as utterly useless with a crying child, as a one-armed man in a concert of fiddlers.”

The cell assigned to the new prisoner was in the centre of a line, which rose tier above tier, like the compartments in a pigeon house, or the sombre caves hewn out of rock-ribbed cliffs, in some lonely Laura.  Iron stairways conducted the unfortunates to these stone cages, where the dim cold light filtered through the iron lattice-work of the upper part of the door, made a perpetual crepuscular atmosphere within.  The bare floor, walls, and low ceiling were spotlessly clean and white; and an iron cot with heavy brown blankets spread smoothly and a wooden bench in one corner, constituted the furniture.  Scrupulous neatness reigned everywhere, but the air was burdened with the odor of carbolic acid, and even at mid-day was chill as the breath of a tomb.  Where the doors were thrown open, they resembled the yawning jaws of rifled graves; and when closed, the woful inmates peering through the black lattice seemed an incarnation of Dante’s hideous Caina tenants.

When Mrs. Singleton stopped in front of No. 19, and looked through the grating, Beryl was standing at the extremity of the cell, with her face turned to the wall, and her hands clasping the back of her neck.  The ceiling was so low she could have touched it, had she lifted her arms, and she appeared to have retreated as far in the gloomy den as the barriers allowed.  Thinking that perhaps the girl was praying, the warden’s wife waited some minutes, but no sound greeted her; and so motionless was the figure, that it might have been only an alto rilievo carved on the wall.  Pushing the door open, Mrs. Singleton entered, and deposited on the iron bed a waiter covered with a snowy napkin.  At the sound, Beryl turned, and her arms fell to her side, but she shrank back against the wall, as if solitude were her only solace, and human intrusion an added torture.

Mrs. Singleton took both hands, and held them firmly: 

“Do you believe it right to commit suicide?”