"It is well known to the most of our readers that the long-pending case against Gerald Huntington was decided in the court on Monday by a sentence of ten years' confinement in the penitentiary. The prisoner was remanded to the county jail to remain until Friday, when he was to be removed to the penitentiary. Tuesday evening, at dusk, he was visited in his cell by a veiled lady who remained with him half an hour engaged in deep and private conversation. It is supposed that this mysterious stranger conveyed to him a club which was skillfully concealed beneath her voluminous draperies. At nightfall the prisoner, armed with this enormous and heavy implement, assaulted the keeper who brought him his supper, and succeeded in escaping into the hall, where he knocked down the door-keeper and made a desperate run for liberty. He was pursued by several persons, who captured and bound him after a terrible struggle. He is now heavily ironed and chained down to the floor of his cell. Public curiosity is highly excited over the mysterious veiled visitant who furnished him the club, but the prisoner preserves a dogged and obstinate silence regarding her, and nothing is known of her in the town."
"Oh, poor fellow!" cried Jaquelina, quite involuntarily, as he paused. "Chained to the floor of his cell! How dreadful!"
"You are not sorry for the wretch—are you, Lina?" said her uncle, looking at her in surprise.
"Yes—very sorry," she said, shuddering at the thought of the gloomy prison cell, and the clanking chains that held Gerald Huntington down from the free, wild woodland life he loved.
"Well, you hadn't ought to be sorry," said Mrs. Meredith, who had come in from the spring-house with the fresh butter and milk for tea, with Dollie trotting behind her, a great, red apple in either chubby fist; "his capture made you two hundred dollars the richer—if you hadn't spent every dollar of it so foolishly," she added, as an after-thought, and in an injured tone, for she had been deeply offended at the way in which Jaquelina had spent her money. "She had ought to have given it to her uncle to pay for her keep," was her frankly expressed opinion.
Jaquelina made no answer to Mrs. Meredith's taunt. She was looking at her uncle wistfully.
"Uncle Charles, did you stop at the post-office?" she asked, shyly.
"Why, certainly. How did I come by the newspaper, else?" inquired the farmer, with a sly twinkle of his gray eyes.
"Were—were there any letters for me?" said the girl, coloring under his laughing glance.
"Two," said Mr. Meredith, "and only the day before yesterday there were two. It seems as if Mr. Valchester has nothing to do but write love-letters."