The jailer, Elton, is a good man, and truly concerned about the condition of his prisoner.

He talked to me to-day about him so compassionately, that I asked whether it would be possible for any one residing in the town to be allowed to visit him.

He said any one I chose to bring with me should see him, and therefore there need be no gossip or surprise at your mother going, first of all." There was no more to be said; and each of the three was glad to let the conversation drop and try to turn their thoughts to other and less painfully absorbing subjects.

But to mother and daughter all other subjects were but empty words; memory in the former, and imagination in the latter were busy perpetually with that one who, by the laws of God and man, ought to have been the third at their fireside--who had been for years a vagrant and an outcast, and was now the inmate of a murderer's cell.

Innocent perhaps--and it was strange how that possibility seemed slowly but surely to grow in both their minds; shadowing over, and promising by-and-by to dim in their remembrance the hideous recollections of the past.
Mr.Strafford's words had thus already begun to bear fruit.