-and all her face, neck, and
breast--you saw it as well as I miserable--were at last drenched in
blood. Then I may have confessed that I was guilty--did I, or did I not,
confess it? Tell me--for I remember nothing distinctly;--but if I
did--the judgment of offended Heaven, then punishing me for my sins, had
made me worse than mad--and so had all your abhorrent eyes; and men, if
I did confess, it was the cruelty of God that drove me to it--and your
cruelty--which was great; for no pity had any one for me that day,
though Margaret Burnside lay before me a murdered corpse--and a hoarse
whisper came to my ear urging me to confess--I well believe from no
human lips, but from the Father of Lies, who, at that hour, was suffered
to leave the pit to ensnare my soul." Such was said to have been the
main sense of what he uttered in the presence of two or three who had
formerly been among his most intimate friends, and who knew not, on
leaving his cell and coming into the open air, whether to think him
innocent or guilty. As long as they thought they saw his eyes regarding
them, and that they heard his voice speaking, they believed him
innocent; but when the expression of the tone of his voice, and of the
look of his eyes--which they had felt belonged to innocence--died away
from their memory--then arose against him the strong, strange,
circumstantial evidence, which, wisely or unwisely, lawyers and judges
have said _cannot lie_--and then, in their hearts, one and all of them
pronounced him guilty.

But had not his father often visited the prisoner's cell? Once--and once
only; for in obedience to his son's passionate prayer, beseeching
him--if there were any mercy left either on earth or in heaven--never
more to enter that dungeon, the miserable parent had not again entered
the prison; but he had been seen one morning at dawn, by one who knew
his person, walking round and round the walls, staring up at the black
building in distraction, especially at one small grated window in the
north tower--and it is most probable that he had been pacing his rounds
there during all the night. Nobody could conjecture, however dimly, what
was the meaning of his banishment from his son's cell. Gilbert Adamson,
so stern to others, even to his own only daughter, had been always but
too indulgent to his Ludovic--and had that lost wretch's guilt, so
exceeding great, changed his heart into stone, and made the sight of his
old father's grey hairs hateful