When Col.  Sellers was conducted to this cell by the matron and looked in, his emotions quite overcame him, the tears rolled down his cheeks and his voice trembled so that he could hardly speak.  Washington was unable to say anything; he looked from Laura to the miserable creatures who were walking in the corridor with unutterable disgust.  Laura was alone calm and self-contained, though she was not unmoved by the sight of the grief of her friends.

“Are you comfortable, Laura?” was the first word the Colonel could get out.

“You see,” she replied.  “I can’t say it’s exactly comfortable.”

“Are you cold?”

“It is pretty chilly.  The stone floor is like ice.  It chills me through to step on it.  I have to sit on the bed.”

“Poor thing, poor thing.  And can you eat any thing?”

“No, I am not hungry.  I don’t know that I could eat any thing, I can’t eat that.”

“Oh dear,” continued the Colonel, “it’s dreadful.  But cheer up, dear, cheer up;” and the Colonel broke down entirely.

“But,” he went on, “we’ll stand by you.  We’ll do everything for you.  I know you couldn’t have meant to do it, it must have been insanity, you know, or something of that sort.  You never did anything of the sort before.”

Laura smiled very faintly and said,

“Yes, it was something of that sort.  It’s all a whirl.  He was a villain; you don’t know.”

“I’d rather have killed him myself, in a duel you know, all fair.  I wish I had.  But don’t you be down.  We’ll get you the best counsel, the lawyers in New York can do anything; I’ve read of cases.  But you must be comfortable now.  We’ve brought some of your clothes, at the hotel.  What else, can we get for you?”

Laura suggested that she would like some sheets for her bed, a piece of carpet to step on, and her meals sent in; and some books and writing materials if it was allowed.  The Colonel and Washington promised to procure all these things, and then took their sorrowful leave, a great deal more affected than the criminal was, apparently, by her situation.

The colonel told the matron as he went away that if she would look to Laura’s comfort a little it shouldn’t be the worse for her; and to the turnkey who let them out he patronizingly said,

“You’ve got a big establishment here, a credit to the city.  I’ve got a friend in there—­I shall see you again, sir.”

By the next day something more of Laura’s own story began to appear in the newspapers, colored and heightened by reporters’ rhetoric.  Some of them cast a lurid light upon the Colonel’s career, and represented his victim as a beautiful avenger of her murdered innocence; and others pictured her as his willing paramour and pitiless slayer.  Her communications to the reporters were stopped by her lawyers as soon as they were retained and visited her, but this fact did not prevent—­it may have facilitated—­the appearance of casual paragraphs here and there which were likely to beget popular sympathy for the poor girl.