Their cold hearts naught could tell.—Michell.
The first thing Malcolm Montrose did the next morning was to go over to Allworth Abbey to fetch the small sky-terrier that had been Eudora’s only pet.
He found the poor little creature rambling disconsolately about the grounds, where the servants told him she always wandered, as if in search of her lost mistress.
He took her with him in the chaise and drove to the prison.
He was admitted at once to the condemned cell, where he found Eudora reclining upon the bed, from which she seldom now arose, for her strength seemed hourly waning, and it was a question whether she could survive till the day appointed for the execution, to undergo the sentence of the law. She was attended by the stern-faced woman who alternately, with Mrs. Barton, kept guard over the prisoner.
She arose upon her elbow to welcome Malcolm, but before she could speak, Fidelle, with a quick bark of joy, had recognized her mistress, and sprang from the arms of Malcolm to the bosom of Eudora, where she nestled, trembling with delight.
The poor young prisoner smiled faintly as she put one hand caressingly around her favorite, and held out the other to her visitor, saying:
“I thank you very much, dear Malcolm, for fetching her so soon. Poor little thing, I’m glad she does not know,” she added, tenderly caressing her pet.
Ah, but Fidelle did know—if not the nature and particulars of the heavy misfortune—at least that something had gone wofully wrong with her mistress, upon whose faded, wasted, hollow-eyed countenance she gazed with the touching mute eloquence of a dog’s love and sympathy.
Malcolm seated himself beside Eudora, and watched her uneasily as she lay dimly smiling and softly caressing her little dumb friend, and apparently forgetting for the time being her own awful position. And as he noticed her, his heart ached with the foreboding fear that her mind as well as her body was giving way and sinking into imbecility under the pressure of her heavy calamity.