Colonel Clifford prophesied right.  Walter took the lead of a working gang and worked night and day, resting two hours only in the twenty-four, and even that with great reluctance.  Outside the scene was one of bustle and animation.  Little white tents, for the strange workmen to sleep in, dotted the green, and two snowy refreshment tents were pitched outside the Dun Cow.  That establishment had large brick ovens and boilers, and the landlady, and the women she had got to help her, kept the tables always groaning under solid fare that never once flagged, being under the charge of that old campaigner, Colonel Clifford.  The landlady tried to look sad at the occasion which called forth her energy and talents; but she was a woman of business, and her complacency oozed through her.  Ah, it was not so at the pit mouth; the poor wives whose husbands were entombed below, alive or dead, hovered and fluttered about the two shafts with their aprons to their eyes, and eager with their questions.  Deadly were their fears, their hopes fainter and fainter, as day after day went by, and both gangs, working in so narrow a space, made little progress, compared with their own desires, and the prayers of those who trembled for the result.  It was a race and a struggle of two gallant parties, and a short description of it will be given; but as no new incidents happened for six days we shall preserve the chronological order of events, and now relate a daring project which was revived in that interval.

Monckton and Bartley were now enemies.  Sin had united, crime and remorse had disunited them.  Monckton registered a vow of future vengeance upon his late associate, but in the meantime, taking a survey of the present circumstances, he fell back upon a dark project he had conceived years ago on the very day when he was arrested for theft in Bartley’s office.

Perhaps our readers, their memory disturbed by such a number of various matters as we have since presented to them, may have forgotten that project, but what is about to follow will tend to revive their recollection.  Monckton then wired to Mrs. Braham’s lawyer demanding an immediate interview with that lady; he specified the hour.

The lawyer went to her directly, the matter being delicate.  He found her in great distress, and before he could open his communication she told him her trouble.  She said that her husband, she feared, was going out of his mind; he groaned all night and never slept, and in the daytime never spoke.

There had been just then some surprising falls and rises in foreign securities, and the shrewd lawyer divined at once that the stock-broker had been doing business on his own account, and got pinched; so he said, “My dear madam, I suspect it is business on the Exchange; he will get over that, but there is something that is immediately pressing,” and he then gave her Monckton’s message.

Now her nerves were already excited, and this made matters worse.  She cried and trembled, and became hysterical, and vowed she would never go near Leonard Monckton again; he had never loved her, had never been a friend to her as Jonathan Braham had.  “No,” said she; “if he wants money, take and sell my jewels; but I shall stay with my husband in his trouble.”