that I should win over poverty and want.  I was so poor in worldly goods, but oh!—­Croesus could not have bought my proud hopes!  So rich, so overflowing with high hope!  As I think of my feelings that day, among the primroses and pine cones, it seems a hundred years ago, and I recall the image of a girl long dead; such a proud girl; so happy in the beautiful world of the art she loved!  Then some strange awful curse that had lain in wait, ambushed among the flowers I gathered that last day of my dead existence, fell upon me—­I saw you!  No wonder I shivered, when you met me.  I saw you.  Then my sun sickened and went out, and my hopes crumbled, and my youth shrivelled and perished forever; and the wide world is a rayless dungeon, and the girl Beryl is buried so deep, that the Angels of the Resurrection will never find her!—­and I?—­I am only a withered, disgraced woman, hurled into a den; trampled, branded; with a soul devoured by despairing bitterness, with a broken heart, a brain on fire!  If you had drawn a knife across my throat, or sent a bullet through my temples, my spirit might have rested in the Beyond, and I could have forgiven that which hastened me to heaven; but you strangled my hopes, and mutilated my youth, and dishonored my father’s name!—­You robbed me of my stainless character, and cast me among outlaws and fiends!—­ Worse yet, oh! blackest of all your crimes!—­you have almost throttled my faith in Christ.  You have torn away my hold upon the eternal God!  You are the curse of my life.  You wish you had never set your eyes on me?  Take courage, finish your work; the best of me is utterly dead already, and when you have taken my blood, and laid my polluted body in a convict’s shallow grave, your enmity will be satiated.  Then I, at least, I shall be free from my hideous curse.  If there be any comfort left me, it lurks in the knowledge that when you succeed in convicting me, the same world will no longer hold us both.”

Was it the fever of disease, or incipient madness that blazed in her eyes, flamed on her cheeks, and lent such thrilling cadence to her pure clear voice?  Was she a consummate actress, or had he made a frightful mistake, and goaded an innocent girl to the verge of frenzy?  Some occult influence seemed clouding his hitherto infallible perceptions, melting his heart, paralyzing his will.  He walked up and down the floor, with his hands clasped behind him, then came close to the prisoner.

“If I have unjustly suspected and persecuted you, may God forgive me!  If I have wronged you by suspicion and accusation of a crime which you did not commit, then my atonement shall be your triumphant vindication.  I would give a good deal to know that your hands are as pure as they look, and innocent of theft and murder.  Tell me—­tell me the truth.  I will save you, I will give you back all that you have lost, and tenfold more.  For God’s sake, for your own sake, and for mine, I entreat you to tell me the truth.  Did you go back to ‘Elm Bluff’ that night, after I met you in the pine woods?”