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Rh life; now, to my soul, were a sword my midwife!—Hark!—the hangman?—who comes?'

'Thy wife and cousin—so they say;—hope they may be; they may stay till twelve,' wheezingly answered a turnkey, pushing the tottering girls into the cell, and locking the door upon them.

'Ye two pale ghosts, were this the other world, ye were not welcome. Away!—Good Angel and Bad Angel both!—For Pierre is neuter now!'

'Oh, ye stony roofs, and seven-fold stony skies!—not thou art the murderer, but thy sister hath murdered thee, my brother, oh my brother!'

At these wailed words from Isabel, Lucy shrunk up like a scroll, and noiselessly fell at the feet of Pierre.

He touched her heart.—'Dead!—Girl! wife or sister, saint or fiend!'—seizing Isabel in his grasp—'in thy breasts, life for infants lodgeth not, but death-milk for thee and me!—The drug!' and tearing her bosom loose, he seized the secret vial nestling there.

VII

At night the squat-framed, asthmatic turnkey tramped the dim-lit iron gallery before one of the long honey-combed rows of cells.

'Mighty still there, in that hole, them two mice I let in;—humph!'

Suddenly, at the further end of the gallery, he discerned a shadowy figure emerging from the archway there, and running on before an officer, and impetuously approaching where the turnkey stood.

'More relations coming. These wind-broken chaps are always in before the second death, seeing they always miss the first.—Humph! What a froth the fellow's in?—Wheezes worse than me!'