ook upon him all day for nothing! And I knew what a fever of fear
throbbed behind his mask of happy contempt. Yet bravely he played the
part unto the very end. If the toasts of London were determined to gaze
at him, he assured them they should have a proper salve for their
eyes. So he dressed himself as a light-hearted sportsman. His coat and
waistcoat were of pea-green cloth; his buckskin breeches were spotlessly
new, and all tricked out with the famous strings; his hat was bound
round with silver cords; and even the ushers of the Court were touched
to courtesy. He would whisper to me, as we stood in the dock, "Cheer up,
my girl. I have ordered the best supper that Covent Garden can provide,
and we will make merry to-night when this foolish old judge has done his
duty." The supper was never eaten. Through the weary afternoon we waited
for acquittal. The autumn sun sank in hopeless gloom. The wretched lamps
twinkled through the jaded air of the court-house. In an hour I lived
a thousand years of misery, and when the sentence was read, the words
carried no sense to my withered brain. It was only in my cell I realised
that I had seen Jack Rann for the last time; that his pea-green coat
would prove a final and ineffaceable memory.

'Alas! I, who had never been married, was already a hempen widow; but
I was too hopelessly heartbroken for my lover's fate to think of my own
paltry hardship. I never saw him again. They told me that he suffered
at Tyburn like a man, and that he counted upon a rescue to the very
end. They told me (still bitterer news to hear) that two days before
his death he entertained seven women at supper, and was in the wildest
humour. This almost broke my heart; it was an infidelity committed on
the other side of the grave. But, poor Jack, he was a good lad, and
loved me more than them all, though he never could be faithful to me.'
And thus, bidding the drawer bring fresh glasses, Ellen Roach would end
her story. Though she had told it a hundred times, at the last words a
tear always sparkled in her eye. She lived without friend and without
lover, faithful to the memory of Sixteen-String Jack, who for her was
the only reality in the world of shades. Her middle-age was as distant
as her youth. The dressmaker's in Oxford Street was as vague a dream as
the inhospitable shore of Botany Bay. So she waited on to a weary eld,
proud of the 'Green Pig's' well-ordered comfort, prouder still that for
two years she sha