In the days to which our narrative refers the old barbarous and inhuman penal code was still in full operation, and crimes which a short term of imprisonment with hard labor would now expiate had the last dread sentence of the law pronounced on them without hope of reprieve. At the Lanchester spring assizes of that year, as Miss Baynard did not fail to call to mind, a couple of men had been condemned to death, one of them for sheep-stealing and the other for shop-lifting. In the eye of the law the crime for which Geoffrey Dare stood committed was of a much more heinous kind than either of those, and should the charge be proved against him, as there seemed every likelihood of its being, then would the gallows seen by Nell with the eyes of her imagination develop into a very real erection on the roof of Lanchester jail. In such a case as Dare's--whether or no they succeeded in identifying him with "Captain Nightshade"--the death penalty would indubitably be exacted. Justice would demand her victim, while Mercy wept with her face turned to the wall. And still Nell's heart echoed persistently with the cry, "What can I do to help him?" But it was a cry which both earth and heaven flung back, and to which no answer was vouchsafed her. All that day and all the next night she was like a distracted creature, but distracted after the quiet fashion of one who craves for absolute solitude, and to whom even the society of those nearest and dearest is distasteful, if not positively unbearable. Kind-hearted Mrs. Budd was greatly put about, being altogether at a loss to divine what was the matter with Nell, and whether the strangeness of her manner was due to a mental or bodily cause. Never before had she developed such peculiar symptoms, for no more sane and healthy being ever existed. She had never swooned in her life, although swooning, at proper times and season, was regarded rather as a fashionable accomplishment than otherwise. She never fancied that she was ill when nothing ailed her, or pretended that she had lost her appetite; she was never troubled with qualms, or spasms, or "the vertigo"; and as for being dyspeptic, she did not know the meaning of the word. She had been rendered very anxious and unhappy by the abduction of Evan, and proportionately happy by his recovery, but there had been nothing in the way she bore herself at that time which at all resembled the peculiar and inexplicable mood of which she had been the victim for the last four-and-twenty hours.