For an instant after the departure of the Quaker, Eleanor Hill stood erect as he had last seen her. Both hands were pressed upon her heart, and it might have seemed doubtful whether she had nerved herself to that position or lacked power to quit it. Then her eyes fell upon the letter which Bladesden, when she requested him to leave it, had dropped upon a chair; and at the sight the spell, whatever it was, gave way. The poor girl dropped upon her knees before another chair which stood near her, with a cry of such heart-breaking agony as must have moved any heart, not utterly calloused, that listened to it,--dashed her hand into her long, dishevelled hair with such a gesture as indicated that she would madly tear it out by the roots in handfuls, then desisted and broke out through moans and sobs into one of those prayers which the purists believe are seldom or never forgiven by the heaven to which they are addressed--a prayer for immediate death! "Oh God!--let me die! Do let me die, here and at this moment! I cannot live and be so wretched! Let me die!--oh, let me die!" Whether unpardonable or not, the prayer was certainly impious; for next to that last extremity of crime which any man commits when he dismisses his own life, is his crime when he becomes a suicide in heart and wish, without daring to use the physical force necessary for that consummation. Despair is cowardice; the theft of time is a sin that no amendment can repay; and the robbery of that time which heaven allots to a human life, whether in act or thought, is something over which humanity well may shudder. But Eleanor Hill's impious prayer had no answer--at least no answer except the denial found in the breath of life which still fluttered from her nostrils and the blood which seemed to flow in torture through the poor frame sympathizing with the mind within. The aspiration was scarcely yet dead upon her lips when there was a footfall on the floor behind her; and she sprung up with one wild desperate hope darting through her brain, that the stern judge had at last relented after leaving her presence--that he had proved himself capable of a great sacrifice and returned to extricate her feet from the pit into which she was so irretrievably sinking. But that hope died on the instant, another and if possible a madder one taking its place; for before her, as she turned, stood Carlton Brand, though so disfigured and changed in appearance that any one except the most intimate of acquaintances might have been excused for doubting his identity.