“He my husband!” tittered the matron, parrying the question. “I thought as much when you came in,” rejoined Monks, marking the angry glance which the lady darted at her spouse as she spoke. “So much the better; I have less hesitation in dealing with two people, when I find that there’s only one will between them. I’m in earnest—see here.” He thrust his hand into a side-pocket, and producing a canvass bag, told out twenty-five sovereigns on the table, and pushed them over to the woman. “Now,” he said, “gather them up; and when this cursed peal of thunder, that I feel is coming up to break over the house-top, is gone, let’s hear your story.” The roar of thunder, which seemed in fact much nearer, and to shiver and break almost over their heads, having subsided, Monks, raising his face from the table, bent forward to listen to what the woman should say. The faces of the three nearly touched as the two men leant over the small table in their eagerness to hear, and the woman also leant forward to render her whisper audible. The sickly rays of the suspended lantern falling directly upon them, aggravated the paleness and anxiety of their countenances, which, encircled by the deepest gloom and darkness, looked ghastly in the extreme. “When this woman, that we called old Sally, died,” the matron began, “she and I were alone.” “Was there no one by?” asked Monks, in the same hollow whisper, “no sick wretch or idiot in some other bed?—no one who could hear, and might by possibility understand?” “Not a soul,” replied the woman; “we were alone: _I_ stood alone beside the body when death came over it.” “Good,” said Monks, regarding her attentively: “go on.” “She spoke of a young creature,” resumed the matron, “who had brought a child into the world some years before: not merely in the same room, but in the same bed in which she then lay dying.” “Ay?” said Monks, with quivering lip, and glancing over his shoulder. “Blood! How things come about at last!” “The child was the one you named to him last night,” said the matron, nodding carelessly towards her husband; “the mother this nurse had robbed.” “In life?” asked Monks. “In death,” replied the woman, with something like a shudder. “She stole from the corpse, when it had hardly turned to one, that which the dead mother had prayed her with her last breath to keep for the infant’s sake.” “She sold it?” cried Monks, with desperate eagerness; “did she sell it?—where?—when?—to whom?—how long before?” “As she told me with great difficulty that she had done this,” said the matron, “she fell back and died.” “Without saying more?” cried Monks, in a voice which, from its very suppression, seemed only the more furious. “It’s a lie! I’ll not be played with. She said more—I’ll tear the life out of you both, but I’ll know what it was.”