en minutes from that time, Adam was at the door of the cell. Dinah
had sent him word that she could not come to him; she could not leave
Hetty one moment; but Hetty was prepared for the meeting.

He could not see her when he entered, for agitation deadened his senses,
and the dim cell was almost dark to him. He stood a moment after the
door closed behind him, trembling and stupefied.

But he began to see through the dimness--to see the dark eyes lifted up
to him once more, but with no smile in them. O God, how sad they looked!
The last time they had met his was when he parted from her with his
heart full of joyous hopeful love, and they looked out with a tearful
smile from a pink, dimpled, childish face. The face was marble now; the
sweet lips were pallid and half-open and quivering; the dimples were all
gone--all but one, that never went; and the eyes--O, the worst of all
was the likeness they had to Hetty's. They were Hetty's eyes looking
at him with that mournful gaze, as if she had come back to him from the
dead to tell him of her misery.

She was clinging close to Dinah; her cheek was against Dinah's. It
seemed as if her last faint strength and hope lay in that contact, and
the pitying love that shone out from Dinah's face looked like a visible
pledge of the Invisible Mercy.

When the sad eyes met--when Hetty and Adam looked at each other--she
felt the change in him too, and it seemed to strike her with fresh
fear. It was the first time she had seen any being whose face seemed to
reflect the change in herself: Adam was a new image of the dreadful past
and the dreadful present. She trembled more as she looked at him.

"Speak to him, Hetty," Dinah said; "tell him what is in your heart."

Hetty obeyed her, like a little child.

"Adam...I'm very sorry...I behaved very wrong to you...will you forgive
me...before I die?"

Adam answered with a half-sob, "Yes, I forgive thee Hetty. I forgave
thee long ago."

It had seemed to Adam as if his brain would burst with the anguish of
meeting Hetty's eyes in the first moments, but the sound of her voice
uttering these penitent words touched a chord which had been less
strained. There was a sense of relief from what was becoming unbearable,
and the rare tears came--they had never come before, since he had hung
on Seth's neck in the beginning of his sorrow.

Hetty made an involuntary movement towards him, some of the love that
she had once lived in the midst of was come n