All the morning of that memorable Monday, while the bells were ringing, and the crowds were shouting in the streets, Charlie De Vere had lain with his white face to the wall, and his lips quivering with the grief and mortification he felt, that it should have ended thus. Occasionally, as the shouts grew louder, he stopped his ears, so as to shut out what seemed to him like exultations over the death of so many hopes; but when Annie came in, and told Maude of the bonfire they were to have that night in Mrs. Simms’ yard, and asked her to come for the sake of the boy whose box was to be burned, Charlie began to listen. And as he listened, he grew interested in Isaac Simms and the grass-plat by the well, and the box hidden in the barn, and he expressed a wish to be present when it was burned. Maude, too, had heard of Isaac Simms before. She knew that he had been captured by Arthur Tunbridge, but she did not know the particulars of his prison life, or how generously Tom had sacrificed his chance of liberty for the sake of the poor, sick boy, until Annie told the story, to which she listened with swimming eyes and a heart throbbing with love and respect for her lover, who had been so noble and unselfish. She would go to the bonfire on the grass-plat, she said; and Charlie should go too. _He_ had wept passionately at the recital of Isaac’s sufferings in Libby, but still found some excuse for the South generally. “It was not the better class of people,” he said, “who did these things; it was the lower, ignorant ones, whose instincts were naturally brutal.” And neither Maude nor Annie contradicted him, though the eyes of the former flashed indignantly, and her nostrils quivered as they always did when the sufferings of our prisoners were mentioned in her presence.