t upon the prisoner at
the bar. He listened to it as attentively as one who is waiting for the
thunder listens to the muffled menace that precedes it, and the fall of
each big drop of rain. When the words of doom smote upon his ear a
solemn hush succeeded them; and then one piteous, agonized shriek, and a
dull fall in the gallery above.

"This way," said a warder, sharply; and Richard was seized by the arm,
and hurried through the trap-door, and down the stairs, by the way he
had come. It seemed to him like descending into hell itself.

Twenty years' penal servitude! It was almost an eternity of torment!
worse than death! and yet not so. He already beheld himself, at the end
of his term of punishment, setting about the great work which alone was
left him to do on earth--the accomplishment of his revenge. He had
recognized his mother's voice in that agonized wail, and knew that her
iron will had given way; that the weight of this unexpected calamity had
deprived even her elastic and vigorous mind of consciousness--had
crushed out of her, perhaps, even life itself. Better so, thought he, in
his bitterness, if it had; there would then be not a single human
creature left to soften, by her attachment, his heart toward his
fellows--none to counsel moderation, mercy, prudence.

If the view taken by the judge had even been a correct one, as to
"motive," Richard had been hardly dealt with, most severely sentenced;
but in his own eyes he was an almost innocent man--the victim of an
infamous conspiracy, in which she who, was his nearest and dearest had
treacherously joined. After flattering him with false hopes, she had
deserted him at the eleventh hour, and in a manner even more atrocious
than the desertion itself. He knew, of course, that it was mainly owing
to her evidence, to which he had looked for his preservation, that his
ruin had been so complete and overwhelming; but what he hated her worst
for was for that smile she had bestowed upon him as she entered the
witness-box, and which had bade him hope where no hope was. He could not
be mistaken as to that. She had known that she was about to doom him by
her silence to years of misery, and yet she had had the devilish cruelty
to smile upon him, as she had often smiled, when they had sat, cheek to
cheek, together! Since they had done so, he could never lift his hand
against her (he felt that even now)--never strike her, slay her, nor
even poison her; but he would have reveng