The great beads of agony stood on the girl's brow as she looked at the youth on his trial for murder, and endeavoured to retract the damning admissions she had previously made to the police—admissions which led to her lover's arrest, and practically put the rope round his neck.
The law has laid the man in a murderer's grave within the prison walls. The girl a few days before his execution bore a dead child.
In two months of her young life she sounded the deepest depths of human tragedy. She has known a torture and a despair which few women of her age have been fated to endure.
But in this quiet home she is being cared for and tended, and noble-hearted women are waiting and hoping for the moment when she can be given the chance of a better life.
In the pocket of the dress she wears there are two letters carefully wrapped up in thick paper to preserve them. They are the last letters her murderer lover wrote her. She will treasure them all her life.
If in the early days of the trial we could have removed the wall of the prison in which the man was confined we should have seen him scratching the girl's portrait on the door of his cell with the point of a common pin, and labelling her with a word that expressed his anger against her for telling the truth about him when she fell into the hands of the police.
He is dead, but behind the grey walls upon which we are gazing to-day is the life tragedy of the girl he left behind him.