him dreary beyond endurance. The mantle of her discontent fell on him,
and, having no other confidant beside honest, stupid Sandy, he talked
to him like a man who seriously thought of abandoning his labor, and
retiring to that land across the sea for which his wife had pined
during ten homesick years.

Sandy, who might have regarded himself in the light of an "humble
instrument," had he been capable of a particle of vanity or
presumption, told Elizabeth Montier, with whom he had held many a
conference concerning prison matters, since Manuel first began to walk
along the southern garden-walk, where the flower-beds lay against the
prison-wall. What was her answer? It came instantly, without
premeditation or precaution,--

"Then we must take his place, Sandy."

"We, Miss?" said Sandy, with even greater consternation than surprise.

"Yes," she replied, too much absorbed by what she was thinking, to mind
him and his blunders,--"papa must take the prison."

"Oh!"--and Sandy blushed through his tan at his absurd mistake. Then he
laughed, for he saw that she had not noticed it. Then he looked grave,
and wondering, and doubtful. The idea of Adolphus Montier's pretty wife
and pretty daughter changing their pretty home for life in the dark
prison startled him. He seemed to think it no less wrong than strange.
But he did not express that feeling out and out; he was hindered, as he
glanced sideways at the young girl who gazed so solemnly, so loftily,
before her. At what she was looking he could not divine. He saw
nothing.