Mr. Ellsworth will make you rich."

"Rich, is it? and him a-dying!" grunted Sheila Kelly, indifferently.

"Dying! Oh, what mean you, Sheila? Speak! What has happened to my
darling?" shrieked poor Dainty, in wild alarm.

Sheila Kelly shrugged her shoulders, and proceeded to fill the dying
lamp with fresh oil from a tin can she had brought in her capacious
basket. Then sitting down on the foot of the narrow cot, she began and
recounted the events of the morning to her anxious listener, ending
with:

"Shure, the mane, murtherin' Ashley is safe in jail, t' ould Leddy
Ellsworth, going from one fainting fit ter another, and Masther Lovelace
a-laying with ter bullet in his head, niver spakin' a worrud since he
was shot, niver opening his eyes, jist a-dying by inches, sez all the
docthers."

Oh, the shrieks of despair that filled the gloomy cell! They were enough
to move a heart of stone; but Dainty's tormentor was cruel as a fiend.

She listened unmoved to the expressions of despair and the prayers for
liberty, and laughed incredulously, when the girl cried, desperately:

"Oh, Sheila! for God's sake, let me go to the side of my dying husband!
Yes, he is my own dear husband, and my place is by him now, to soothe
his last hours. We were married secretly two weeks ago, because he
feared our cruel enemies would devise some scheme to tear us from each
other, as indeed they have done. But now that you know the truth, you
would not keep a young wife from the side of her dying husband, would
you? You will set me free, to go to him?"

But the wretch shook her head, with a mocking laugh.

"You will never see the light of day again!" she said, calmly.

"Oh, Sheila, do you forget that I have a mother to mourn me as well as a
husband? A poor widowed mother, who has no one but me in the wide, wide
world! I am the light of her eyes and her heart. She will die of a
broken heart at my mysterious fate! For her sake, Sheila, if not for my
own and my husband's, I beg you for my liberty!" prayed the wretched
prisoner, kneeling on the cold floor at her tormentor's feet.

But she might as well have prayed to the cold stone wall as to such a
fiend in human form.

"Ye're wastin' worruds, Dainty Chase!" she said, mockingly, as she rose
to go. "Ye'll niver come out of this cell alive, I tell you; so the
sooner yer make up yer mind ter die, the better; and I'll kem ag'in this
day week, hoping ter find yer cold corp on the bed!"

"One word