"What are they doing? Have they the heart to ill-use you? O master, God bless you! God shield you! I shall never see you, who was my only friend--who was every one's friend--any more!" Aram drew himself from her, and said, with a quivering lip to Rowland Lester,-- "If her fears are true--if--if I never more return hither, see that her old age does not starve--does not want." Lester could not speak for sobbing, but the request was remembered. And now Aram, turning aside his proud head to conceal his emotion, beheld open the door of the room so trimly prepared for Madeline's reception: the flowers smiled upon him from their stands. "Lead on, gentlemen," he said quickly. And so Eugene Aram passed his threshold! "Ho, ho!" muttered the old hag whose predictions in the morning had been so ominous,--"ho, ho! you'll believe Goody Darkmans another time! Providence respects the sayings of the ould. 'T was not for nothing the rats grinned at me last night. But let's in and have a warm glass. He, he! there will be all the strong liquors for us now; the Lord is merciful to the poor!" As the little group proceeded through the valley, the officers first, Aram and Lester side by side, Walter, with his hand on his pistol and his eye on the prisoner, a little behind, Lester endeavored to cheer the prisoner's spirits and his own by insisting on the madness of the charge and the certainty of instant acquittal from the magistrate to whom they were bound, and who was esteemed the one both most acute and most just in the county. Aram interrupted him somewhat abruptly, "My friend, enough of this presently. But Madeline, what knows she as yet?" "Nothing; of course, we kept--" "Exactly, exactly; you have done wisely. Why need she learn anything as yet? Say an arrest for debt, a mistake, an absence but of a day or so at most,--you understand?" "Yes. Will you not see her, Eugene, before you go, and say this yourself?" "I!--O God!--I! to whom this day was--No, no; save me, I implore you, from the agony of such a contrast,--an interview so mournful and unavailing. No, we must not meet! But whither go we now? Not, not, surely, through all the idle gossips of the village,--the crowd already excited to gape and stare and speculate on the--" "No," interrupted Lester; "the carriages await us at the farther end of the valley. I thought of that,--for the rash boy behind seems to have changed his nature. I loved--Heaven knows how I loved my brother! But before I would let suspicion thus blind reason, I would suffer inquiry to sleep forever on his fate." "Your nephew," said Aram, "has ever wronged me. But waste not words on him; let us think only of Madeline. Will you go back at once to her,-- tell her a tale to lull her apprehensions, and then follow us with haste? I am alone among enemies till you come."