She found him in a lower room, gazing forth as he had done above, but the expression of his countenance was more sad and less fierce than before. Mona advanced towards him, but he heeded her not; she laid her hand upon his arm, but he did not turn his head. She was a creature of noble impulses, however, and where her heart prompted she would not be repelled. The tears, indeed, sprang to her eyes and ran over her cheeks, but still she cast herself on her husband's bosom, saying, "I have done wrong, Franklin; I should not have interfered where you thought fit to act. I was sorry for the young man, and I thought that he might have friends and relations, and perhaps a wife, that loved him as I love you, and I wished you to send him back to his happy home on that account. But I was wrong to speak of it at all, and still more wrong to speak of it before him. Forgive me, Franklin; I will not offend again." Franklin Gray pressed her to his heart, and kissed the tears off her cheek; and--although the seed of suspicion and doubt, once sown in a soil so congenial to it as his mind, can never, perhaps, be wholly eradicated, take what pains we will--yet he was anxious to feel as he had felt, somewhat ashamed of having given way to such bitterness towards her who was associated with all the better spirits of his heart's dark tabernacle, and grieved to see the grief of one who had brought the only real sweet sunshine on his path that he had known through life. He pressed her then to his bosom, he treated her gently and kindly, and once more, to her powerful gentleness, the fierce and lion-like spirit of her husband was softened and bowed down. She had not said one word of the dark shade of jealousy which had shown itself in Franklin Gray's first words to her. She was far too wise to comment on it, or to attempt to do it away by any eloquence but those of acts. She saw it plainly, however; she felt that what in her breast was but pity, had been misunderstood by her husband; and from a certain vague expression on Lord Harold's face when last he spoke to her, she feared that, with him, man's vanity had once more misjudged woman's best feelings. She blamed herself, however, more than either: "I should have known," she thought, "that man cannot see into the heart;" and from that hour she went near the prisoner no more. She gave no cause for so abstaining, and she took care that the woman who accompanied her should provide for his comfort as far as might be. It is the meed of such conduct, however, almost always to pass unremarked; the recompense, the success is in our own hearts. Franklin Gray saw that she was less with the prisoner than before, but he did not see that she was never with him at all. CHAPTER XXVIII.