Mrs. Singleton took her hand and pressed it gently.

“I am going to trust, and help, and love you, if you will let me; and for the present, I intend to keep you in a room adjoining mine, where you will have no fear of wicked neighbors.”

“That will be merciful indeed.  May God bless you for the thought.”

Down iron staircases, and through dim corridors bordered with dark cells, gloomy as the lairs of wild beasts whom the besotted inmates resembled, the two women walked; and once, when a clank of chains and a hoarse human cry broke the dismal silence, Beryl clutched her companion’s arm, and her teeth chattered with horror.

“Yes, it is awful!  That poor woman is the saddest case we have.  She waylaid and stabbed her husband to death, and poisoned his mother.  We think she is really insane, and as she is dangerous at times, it is necessary to keep her chained, until arrangements can be made to remove her to the insane asylum.”

“I don’t wonder she is mad!  People cannot dwell here and retain their reason; and madness is a mercy that blesses them with forgetfulness.”

Beryl shivered, and her eyes glittered with an unnatural and ominous brilliance.

The warden’s wife paused before a large door with solid iron panels, and rang a bell.  Some one on the other side asked: 

“What is the order?  Who rang?”

“Mrs. Singleton; I want to get into the chapel.  Let me out, Jasper.”

The door swung slowly back, and the guard touched his hat respectfully.

Through an open arcade, where the sunlight streamed, Mrs. Singleton led her companion; then up a short flight of stone steps, and they found themselves in a long room, with an altar railing and pulpit at one end, and rows of wooden benches crossing the floor from wall to wall.  Even here, the narrow windows were iron barred, but sunshine and the sweet, pure breath of the outside world entered freely.  Within the altar railing, and at the right of the reading desk where a Bible lay, stood a cabinet organ.  Leaving the prisoner to walk up and down the aisle, Mrs. Singleton opened the organ, drew out the stops, and after waiting a few moments, began to play.

At first, only a solemn prelude rolled its waves of harmony through the peaceful sunny room, but soon the strains of the beautiful Motet “Cast thy burden on the Lord,” swelled like the voice of some divine consoler.  Watching the stately figure of the prisoner who wandered to and fro, the warden’s wife noticed that like a magnet the music drew her nearer and nearer each time she approached the chancel, and at last she stood with one hand on the railing.  The beautiful face, sharpened and drawn by mental agony, was piteously wan save where two scarlet spots burned on her cheeks, and the rigid lips were gray as some granite Statue’s, but the eyes glowed with a strange splendor that almost transfigured her countenance.