"And will you give the letter into his own hands, miss, so that his sisters may not see it?"
"I'll try, dear."
Sitting by the door of the cell, under the light from the grill, Fenella wrote with the prison paper on her lap, while Bessie, without a vestige of colour in her forlorn face, dictated from the bed:
"DEAR ALICK,—You will have heard what they are going to do to me. It is dreadful, isn't it? I thought perhaps you would have written me a few lines, though I know it is too much to expect after all the sorrow and shame I have brought on you.
"Oh, if I could only have lived to make it up to you! We could have gone away, as you always said, to America or somewhere. I should have been so good, and we should have been so happy and nobody to cast all this up to us.
"What I did was very wrong, but I don't see what good it will do to the King to take my life, and me a poor girl he never saw in the world. I still think if there were anybody to speak for me he would forgive me even yet and everything would be all right. But that's more than anybody would do for me now, I suppose—even you, though I have always loved you so dear."
Bessie paused.
"Is that all?" asked Fenella, in a husky whisper.
"Not quite," said Bessie, and she began again.
"Mother was here last week and brought me your photo. It got wet in my bag on the way from Derby Haven, and it is cracked and smudged. But I kiss it constant and it is such company.