He had heard from his mother, who had summoned up great courage and resolution upon the occasion, and was labouring diligently to provide means for his defence; and he had written two letters, to neither of which however, he had received any answer. The one was to Lucy Effingham, and the other to Everard Morrison. Charles Tyrrell, however, neither doubted the affection of the one, nor the friendship of the other. But he was anxious and uneasy. He feared that the horrible events which had occurred might have made Lucy ill, and he longed too for assurances that she did not regret having connected, by the bond of affection, her fate with one who seemed to have been of late marked out for mischance and unhappiness. There are few minds that can endure calmly an enforced solitude. We may encounter evil and dangers without shrinking or fear. We may undergo sorrows and pains with firmness and resolution. In almost all cases where freedom is left, and a communion with our fellow-men, imagination links itself with hope sooner or later, and carries us on to brighter scenes and happier days. But in the solitude of a prison, gloom and despondency are the companions of fancy. She takes none of her suggestions from the bright storehouses of hope; she sits and ponders with us over bitter memories or spreads out the sombre future like a pall. Charles Tyrrell strove energetically to nerve his mind, and to resist the suggestions of despair. But which way could he look? what could he do? if he thought at all, what were the images presented to his mind? His dead father murdered and followed to the grave by menials alone: his mother with her heart torn and agonized, forcing herself from the bed of sickness to exert herself on his behalf, while every word that she must hear, and every act that she must do, could but serve to wring her heart more painfully, and call up every fearful impression of the past and the future: his promised bride, her he loved better than anything else on earth, with all her young happiness blighted, all her bright prospects gone, mourning ineffectually over his fate, and sorrowing for his ruined character and wounded name: and then the future, the dark, inscrutable, terrible future, that vast interminable cloud, filled with objects that we know not, but which to the eyes of Charles Tyrrell, rolled into every frightful form, and assumed every dark and threatening hue. With these things and such as these were his thoughts busy about eleven o'clock on the fourth night of his imprisonment, when one of the turnkeys opened the door and Everard Morrison presented himself. Charles advanced and grasped his hand eagerly, saying, "I thought you would come, Morrison, I have been longing for you, to consult with you on various matters." Morrison was very pale, and there was an anxious and excited look about him, which Charles Tyrrell had seldom seen.