his injustice he had resolved to rebel. It was
monstrous, he thought, that they should refuse to hear the witness who
was so ready to speak in his favour, infamous that they should send him
back to his doom without allowing her to say a word in his defence. But
he would defeat that scheme. He had planned a method of escape, and he
would break from his bonds, fling himself at her feet, and pray her to
speak the truth for him, and so save him. Strong in his faith in her,
and with his love for her brightened by the love he had borne to her
dream-image, he felt sure of her power to rescue him now, as he had
rescued her before. "If she knew I was alive, she would come to me," he
said. "I am sure she would. Perhaps they told her that I was dead."

Meditating that night in the solitude of his cell--his evil character
had gained him the poor luxury of loneliness--he almost wept to think of
the cruel deception that had doubtless been practised on her. "They have
told her that I was dead, in order that she might learn to forget me;
but she could not do that. I have thought of her so often during these
weary years that she must sometimes have thought of me. Five years!
She must be a woman now. My little child a woman! Yet she is sure to be
childlike, sweet, and gentle. How she will grieve when she hears of my
sufferings. Oh! my darling, my darling, you are not dead!" And then,
looking hastily about him in the darkness, as though fearful even there
of being seen, he pulled from out his breast a little packet, and felt
it lovingly with his coarse, toil-worn fingers, reverently raising it to
his lips, and dreaming over it, with a smile on his face, as though it
were a sacred talisman that should open to him the doors of freedom.

CHAPTER VIII. AN ESCAPE.

A few days after this--on the 23rd of December--Maurice Frere was
alarmed by a piece of startling intelligence. The notorious Dawes had
escaped from gaol!

Captain Frere had inspected the prison that very afternoon, and it had
seemed to him that the hammers had never fallen so briskly, nor the
chains clanked so gaily, as on the occasion of his visit. "Thinking
of their Christmas holiday, the dogs!" he had said to the patrolling
warder. "Thinking about their Christmas pudding, the luxurious
scoundrels!" and the convict nearest him had laughed appreciatively, as
convicts and schoolboys do laugh at the jests of the man in authority.
All seemed contentment. Moreover, he had