Ah! her best friends, asking themselves this question, were forced to answer, "Yes!"
This state of affairs had a most depressing effect upon Sybil's husband, especially as he had sustained a great loss in the departure of her zealous advocate, Ishmael Worth.
The young lawyer, soon after he had brought down Sybil's respite from the Governor, had been called away on business of the utmost importance, and had eventually sailed for Europe. He had gone, however, with the most confident expectations of her liberation.
How these expectations were destined to be defeated, it was now plain to see.
It required all Mr. Berners' powers of self-control to wear a calm demeanor in the presence of his unsuspicious wife. He had carefully kept from the cell every copy of a news-*paper that contained any allusion to the condemned prisoner and her circumstances, and he did this to keep Beatrix, as well as Sybil, ignorant of the impending doom; for he wished Beatrix to preserve in Sybil's presence the cheerful countenance that she never could wear if she should discover the thunder-cloud of destruction that lowered darker and heavier, day by day, over the head of her doomed companion.
But Sybil herself was losing her good spirits. The autumn had set in very early; and though now it was but October, the weather was too cool and often also too damp to make it prudent for the poor prisoner to spend so many hours in the prison garden as she had lately been permitted to do. She sat much in her cell, sad, silent, and brooding.
"What is the matter with you, my darling?" inquired Beatrix Pendleton one day, when they sat together in the cell, Beatrix sewing diligently on an infant's robe, and Sybil, with her neglected needle-work lying on her lap, and her head bowed upon her hand, "What is the matter with you, Sybil?"
"Oh, Beatrix, I don't know. But this autumn weather, it saddens me. Oh, more than that—worse than that, it horrifies me so much! It seems associated with—I know not what of anguish and despair. And I want to leave this desolate and gloomy place. It is so lonely, now that all the visitors have gone but ourselves. How can you bear it, Beatrix?"
"Very well, dear, so long as I have your company," answered Miss Pendleton, wondering that Sybil should miss the throng of visitors that had existed only in her own imagination.
"But I am homesick, Beatrix. Oh, Beatrix! I am so—so—homesick!" said Sybil, plaintively.