"Are you ill?" inquired the old lady, moving softly around the stand. "Something in the paper must have distressed you."
"Yes," answered the huckster woman, taking up the journal, and pointing with her unsteady finger to the paragraph she had been reading, "I am heart sick; see, I know all these people; I loved some of them. It has taken away my breath. Do you believe that it is true?"
The lady reached forth her hand, and taking the paper, read the account of Leicester's murder and Mr. Warren's arrest, to the end. Mrs. Gray was looking anxiously in her face, and, though it was white and still as the coldest marble, it seemed to the good woman as if it contracted about the mouth, and a look of subdued pain deepened around the eyes.
"Do you believe it?" questioned Mrs. Gray, forgetting that the person she addressed was an entire stranger.
"Yes," answered the lady, speaking with apparent effort—"yes, he is dead!"
"What! murdered by that old man? I don't believe it. It's against nature!"
"He died a violent death," answered the lady, shrinking as if with pain.
"Then he killed himself," answered Mrs. Gray, recovering something of her natural energy, "it was like him."
"Oh! God forbid!"
The lady uttered these words in a low, gasping tone, as if Mrs. Gray's speech had confirmed some unspoken dread in her own heart. The noble old huckster woman saw that she was giving pain, and did not press the subject.