"Yes, Heaven knows, villain as I have been, that they have all snapped _but one_"--and he caught the hand of the poor girl, and tried to place it on his heart, but his strength failed him. She wept aloud at this unexpected burst of feeling, and the contagion of her tears extended even to the stony heart of the wounded man himself. The iron had at length entered into his soul, and what the retrospect of his own ill-spent life--what the intensity of his present agony, and the fearful prospect before him through eternity, could not wring from him--now flowed at the sight of the poor girl's misery, as if his bosom had been a tender woman's. He wept aloud. "Yes--my evil courses have but too justly estranged all my kindred from me; one friend has dropped off after another, until, in the prime of life, after having squandered a handsome patrimony, and having been educated as a gentleman, with every thing around me that ought to have made me happy, to this have I come at last!" He groaned heavily. "You see before you, Mr Brail, not a _fiend, but an everyday villain_--a man not naturally wicked--one who did not love evil for evil's sake, but who became the willing slave of his passions, and held no law, human or divine, in reverence, when they were to be gratified. Ay, William Adderfang, here you lie on a death-bed from violence--from a wound sustained in the act of stabbing and robbing another, to gratify revenge, and the paltry desire of repossessing money squandered at the gaming-table, and with the certainty that, if a miracle interposed, and you recovered, your life would still be taken on the scaffold. Ay, here you lie," continued he with increasing energy, "without one soul in the wide world to say God bless you, or to close your eyes when you are gone, but my poor Antonia here." Here the unhappy girl's anguish became uncontrollable, although she could not have understood what he said, and she threw herself on the bed in such a position as to give her paramour great pain; a shudder passed over his face, and he endeavoured to turn himself round, so as to gain an easier position. In the action the wound in his side burst out afresh, and presently a dark puddle coagulated on the sheet at his right side. The doctor of the prison was in immediate attendance, and applied styptics to stanch the bleeding; all the time he seemed in a dead faint--he made no movement, and when the wound was dressed, and he was replaced on his bed, I did not know, as I bent over him, whether the spirit had fled or not.