ng the torn rep in her
hand. It dropped in a heap with the fringe, then the inner lining was
torn away, handsful of hair were pulled out from among the springs, and
that casket with a package of papers rustled and shook in the old
woman's hands.

Mrs. Yates trembled from head to foot. It was many long years since she
had touched heavy work like that, and it shocked her whole frame.

The dull monotony of sewing upon prison garments had undermined all her
great natural strength. She sat there panting for breath, and white to
the lips. The excitement had been too much for this poor prison woman.

She sat like a dazed creature, looking down into the casket which lay
open in her lap, with ten thousand rainbow fires leaping out of it, as
the blaze in the chimney quivered and danced and blazed over the
diamonds. That morning the old woman had crept out of prison in her
moth-eaten garments, and a little charity money in her bosom. Now a
fortune blazed up from her lap.

There was money, too, a purse heavy with sovereigns, dropped there from
the gold contained in that malachite box, from which all her awful
sorrows had sprung. She gathered up these things in the skirt of her
dress and sat brooding over them a long time, while the fire rose and
crackled, and shed warm floods of light all around her, and the rain
poured down in torrents. She was completely worn out at last, and
thought itself became a burden; then her head fell back upon the ruined
cushions of the chair, which held her in a half-sitting position, as the
heaviest sleep that ever came to mortal eyes fell upon her.

Still the rain poured down continually upon the roof and overran the
gutters in torrents. Up from the darkness of a hollow near by, the rush
and roar of a stream, swollen into a torrent, came through the beating
storm like a heavy bass voice pouring its low thunders through a strain
of music. The great elm tree at the end of the house tossed its
streaming branches, and beat them upon the roof, till a host of warriors
seemed breaking their way through, while the old vines were seized by
the wind and ripped from the sides of the house, as the storm seizes
upon the cords of a vessel, and tears them up into a net work of tangled
floss.

The old woman who had left her stone cell in the prison for the first
time in fourteen years, heard nothing of this, but lay half upon the
floor half on the broken chair, with the broad blaze of the fire
flashing over he