fiend of Nina until he had exhausted the vocabulary of his eloquent denunciations, and when he sat down and the jury filed out slowly one by one, no one doubted what the verdict would be. Nina had sat and listened to him with a pale, indignant, dismayed face. That any one could have the heart to so denounce her, misrepresent her, and abuse her, seemed horrible indeed to the innocent and ignorant young girl so unversed in the ways of the world. She clung convulsively to Kitty, and the bitter tears rolled slowly down her cheeks as she heard him seemingly with malice prepense, arguing her young life away, and dooming her to a terrible, shameful death. “I cannot die now, I must live for Talbot’s sake, for he loves me, and it would grieve him to know that I died such a terrible death,” she had been saying over and over to herself, in the blissful emotion born of the letter she clutched tightly in her hand, and the man’s dreadful denunciatory words thrilled her with horror. She turned her great haggard dark eyes upon the faces of the jurymen and scanned them piteously as if trying to read their inmost hearts. “Oh, Kitty, will they believe that I am as bad as that man says I am? Will they say that I am guilty, and condemn me to be hung?” she whispered to her attendant, with an awful shudder. Kitty pressed the clinging, trembling white fingers fondly in her own. “No, no, darling, they could not be so cruel,” she whispered back, and she tried to explain to the trembling, frightened girl that it was the duty of the prosecuting attorney to make the case out as bad as possible, but that the jurymen were not bound to believe him, and that the verdict rested with them alone. But the long, labored speech, bristling with satire and acrimony, was over at last. The charge to the jurymen had been given, and they had filed out with solemn faces, on their errand of life and death. The court sat waiting in silence or with subdued murmurs of converse for the verdict. And to Talbot Strangemore so far away from home there came no prescience of that awful twilight hour when his beautiful bride sat in the midst of that awful throng, waiting to know whether they were going to set her free to wait for her husband’s home-coming, or whether they were going to kill her for a crime she had never committed. * * * * * It seemed to Nina a long, long time while she waited there in the great suffocating court-room crowded full of men and women, all so eager to know whether the law was going to let her live or die, that they did not go home to their suppers, but waited long after the night fell, unwilling to go away until they knew what her fate would be.