The
captain, he too, was eager, as your honour can imagine. My faith, we
thought and we thought, and we schemed and contrived, and in the end,
there was only one thing to complete our plot--to bribe the jailer.
Would your honour believe--it was only that one little difficulty. My
Lady had given me a hundred guineas, I had enough money, your honour
sees. But the man--I had smoked with him, drunk with him, ay, and made
him drunk too, and I thought all was going well, but when I hinted to
him what we wanted--Ah! he was a brute--I tell you I had hard work to
escape the prison myself, and only for my leaving him with some of the
money, I should now be pinched there too. I hardly dare show my face
in the place any more. And my poor Lady builds on the hope, and Mr.
the Captain--I had to tell him, he took it like an angel. Ah, the poor
gentleman! He looked at me so brave and kind! 'I am as grateful, my
poor friend, as if you had done it,' said he, 'and perhaps it is all
for the best.' All for the best--ah, your honour!"

Rene fairly broke down here, and wept on his sleeve. But Sir Adrian's
eyes, circled and worn with watching and thought, shone dry with a far
deeper grief, as, a few moments later, he passed along the street
towards the walls of the castle.

* * * * *

There was in those days little difficulty in obtaining admission to a
condemned prisoner; and, in the rear of the red-headed, good-tempered
looking jailer--the same, he surmised, whose sternness in duty had
baffled the Breton's simple wiles--he stepped out of the sweet morning
sunshine into the long stone passages. The first tainted breath of the
prison brought a chill to his blood and oppression to his lungs, and
the gloom of the place enveloped him like a pall.

With a rattle of keys a door dismally creaking on its hinges was swung
back at last, and the visitor was ushered into the narrow cell, dark
for all its whitewashed walls, where Captain Jack was spending his
last hours upon earth. The hinges groaned again, the door slammed, and
the key once more grated in the lock. Sir Adrian was alone with his
friend.

For a moment there was silence; the contraction of the elder man's
heart had brought a giddiness to his brain, a dimness of his eyes,
through which he was ill able to distinguish anything.

But then there was a clank of fetters--ah, what a sound to connect
with lucky Jack Smith, the gayest, freest, and most buoyant of