“Forgive me,” he said, humbly; “I had no idea you bore such sorrow. Thank Heaven he has paid the penalty and yes—I am glad that you saw it.” “I am, too,” said Marion, who was deathly pale. “If it had to be—I am glad that I saw it.” CHAPTER X. A CONVICT’S CONFIDENCE. That very afternoon Dr. Brookes got a letter from Dr. Greenaway. It was the first time he had heard from him since he loaned him the five thousand dollars. “Poor chap! He little knows what a shock I had,” he thought, “when for a moment I thought I had discovered his sweetheart in that drunken woman!” He tore open the letter and read it hastily. It was very brief and only took a minute. “I am nicely settled,” wrote Greenaway, “and would be perfectly happy, but my sweetheart has thrown me over—jilted me—to be honest. Of course you will think that if I can talk of it I do not suffer, but at just this minute I must talk or die, and you, doc, are my friend, the only one I have in creation. Yes, May has left me and gone, I don’t know where, but to be honest again, I think it is to the devil! She was always gay, but I trusted her, doc, even while she was abroad for three months. I did not doubt her, but now there is no use denying it any longer, she is a bad, dissolute woman—and yet I love her!” There was a little more to the doctor’s strange letter, but it was the postscript that Dr. Brookes remembered longest and wondered most over. “I haven’t forgotten the name of your little nurse-friend, yet, doc,” it said, “for I have a curious presentiment, in some way, that some sorrow will come to me through Miss Marion Marlowe!” “As queer as ever—queerer, perhaps,” muttered Dr. Brookes as he finished the letter. Then as he went about his work in the meagerly furnished wards he found himself wondering if Greenaway was going crazy. “What a fool to throw himself away on a woman like that!” he said aloud. The next instant he noticed with embarrassment that “Big Belle” had heard him. “By Jove!” thought the doctor, suddenly, “I am going to talk to this woman. Prison rules be hanged! She is a human being, and if any one knows the world this woman knows it.” He turned toward her instantly—there was no one within hearing. “Belle,” he said, quietly, “tell me something of your life. I want to know your motive for being dishonest.” The woman stared at him a moment, and then smiled broadly. There was a vestige of her old shrewdness in the way she answered him. “I have never been proven dishonest,” she said, quietly. “I came up this time on the strength of my reputation, but, granted that I am dishonest, this is my only motive, I wish to hold my own in the struggle of life—I am what you might call a rabid believer in the ‘survival of the fittest.’” “But how long do you expect to survive?” he asked quickly, “and do you call your present existence living?”