Four days of the keenest anxiety crept slowly by.
There was no possible means of hearing how Ishmael Worth prospered in his mission to the governor.
There were but two mails a week from Richmond to Blackville.
Ishmael Worth would go and come with all possible speed, for he must be his own messenger.
It was on the morning of the fifth day, since the young lawyer departed on his humane errand.
Lyon Berners was making his usual morning visit to his wife in her cell.
She was sitting as placidly unconscious of danger as usual, in her harmless hallucination, playing with her little dog, which was coiled up on her lap.
Beatrix Pendleton, who had scarcely left Sybil for an hour since her imprisonment, sat gravely and quietly near, engaged as usual upon some little trifle of needle-work.
And Lyon Berners sat purposely with his back to the light to shade his face, and hide the uncontrollable agitation of his countenance, as he gazed upon his doomed wife, and shuddered to think of the awful issues at stake in the success or failure of Ishmael Worth's mission.
Should this second petition be more fortunate than the first one, and should Mr. Worth succeed in obtaining for her a full pardon, Sybil might go forth this very day a free woman, and her husband might take her far away from these scenes of suffering to some fair foreign land, where she might recover her reason and her peace of mind.