“We may as well finish this case to-night, if Miss Wyett is prepared to testify,” said the squire, at length. “Have you lost anything, Miss Wyett?”
“No,” said Helen; “but I have found my dearest treasure—my own husband!”
And putting her arms around the convict’s neck, she kissed him, and then, dropping her head upon his shoulder, she sobbed violently.
The squire was startled into complete wakefulness, and as the moral aspect of the scene presented itself to him, he groaned:
“Onequally yoked with an onbeliever.”
The officers looked as if they were depraved yet remorseful convicts themselves, while little Guzzy’s diminutive dimensions seemed to contract perceptibly.
At length the convict quieted his wife, and persuaded her to return to her home, with a promise from the officers that she should see him in the morning.
Then the officers escorted the prisoner to the jail, and Guzzy sneaked quietly out, while the squire retired to his slumbers, with the firm conviction that if Solomon had been a justice of the peace at Bowerton, his denial of the newness of anything under the sun would never have been made.
Now, the jail at Bowerton, like everything else in the town, was decidedly antiquated, and consisted simply of a thickly-walled room in a building which contained several offices and living apartments.
It was as extensive a jail as Bowerton needed, and was fully strong enough to hold the few drunken and quarrelsome people who were occasionally lodged in it.