"When you hear what I have to say, you will not be so calm," she went on, with another involuntary heave of her breast. "Listen! your sister is safe. Yes, you may start, but what I say is true. Don't go to the window yet. Stop, hear me! I tell you your sister is safe. Yes, it may be the people you have sent for. Never mind, this is more important. You have locked the door, and nobody can come in. I tell you again and again, your sister is safe. That man is not dead--you know he is not dead. And yesterday--hush! never mind!--yesterday," she said, rising up as Vincent moved, and detaining him with her hand upon his arm, which she clutched with desperate fingers, "he made a declaration that it was not she; a declaration before the magistrates," continued Mrs. Hilyard, gasping as her strength failed her, and following him, holding his arm as he moved to the window, "that it was not she--not she! do you understand me--not she! He swore to it. He said it was another, and not that girl. Do you hear me?" she cried, raising her voice, and shaking his arm wildly in the despair of the moment, but repeating her words with the clearness of desperation--"He said on his oath it was not she." She had followed him to the window, not pleading for herself by a single word, but with her desperate hand upon his arm, her face pinched and pale to the lips, and a horrible anxiety gleaming in the eyes which she never removed from his face. The two stood together there for a moment in that silent encounter; he looking down at the group of people below, she watching his face with her eyes, clutching his arm with her hand, appealing to him with a speechless suspense and terror, which no words can describe. Her fate hung upon the merest thread, and she knew it. She had no more power to move him in her own person than any one of the ragged children who stood gazing up at the window. There he stood, silent, blank, immovable; and she, suffering no expression of her dreadful suspense to escape her, stood clutching his arm, seeing, as she had never seen before, a pale vision of prisons, scaffolds, judgments, obscuring earth and heaven. She was brave, and had dared them all wittingly in the crisis of her fate, but the reality caught the labouring breath from her lips, and turned her heart sick. This morning she had woke with a great burden taken off her mind, and, daring as she was, had faced the only man who had any clue to her secret, confident in his generous nature and her own power over him. But this confidence had failed her utterly, and in the very ease and relief of her mind--a relief more blessed and grateful than she could have acknowledged to any mortal--lo! here arose before her close and real the spectre which she had defied. It approached step by step, while she gazed with wild eyes and panting breath upon the inexorable man who had it in his power to deliver her over to law and justice. She dared not say a word of