"Poor fellow! I can't help feeling sorry for him, although it may be very reprehensible on my part to say so. I am afraid it will go hard with him at his trial. 'Tis said that Captain Nightshade was one of the most chivalrous of men, and never robbed a woman in his life." CHAPTER XXV. A DESPERATE RESOLVE. Lady Carradine's letter, figuratively speaking, smote poor Nell, like a bolt from the blue. She had imagined several things, any one of which might have delayed Dare's coming--he had given her to understand that his business in London would not take up more than a fortnight at the most--but no faintest dread or suspicion that, after so long a time, he would be arrested and cast for trial on a charge connected with his past career had ever entered her mind. It was like a stab in the dark by an unseen hand, and she reeled under it, and felt for a while as if she were hurt in a vital part past hope of recovery. She did not sleep a wink during the whole of the night after her receipt of the news. Now and then she lay down for a little while on a couch, but for the most part she spent the long dark hours in pacing her room restlessly from end to end. No sooner, however, had the first streak of daylight appeared in the sky than she quitted the house, and, making her way down to the banks of the little river which ran past the foot of the park, she followed its solitary windings for some miles, till it drew near the village of Mosscrags, where the early housewives were now astir, and the laborers going forth to their work; then she turned and retraced the way she had come. It had seemed to her that she could think more clearly and coherently under the free air of heaven than in the confined space of her own chamber. All her thinking had for its intent the answering of one question: "What can I do to help him?" But so bitterly did the sense of her powerlessness weigh upon her that she could have beaten her head against the wall in a tempest of rage and impotent passion. She could do nothing--nothing; a month-old babe would be as competent to help him as she was. The four walls of a jail held him, and there was no door of escape open to him save that last one of all which led to the gallows. Several times in the course of the night the shadows that seem to lurk so thickly around one at such times had shaped themselves into the ghastly semblance of a cross-tree with its dangling rope, which, all imaginary though it was, had caused her soul to shudder and grow sick within her.