e poor
blistered patches too distinctly.--You don't think your breathing is
affected, my dear boy? You seem to breathe quickly."

"Perhaps I do, Herbert. Did the woman keep her oath?"

"There comes the darkest part of Provis's life. She did."

"That is, he says she did."

"Why, of course, my dear boy," returned Herbert, in a tone of surprise,
and again bending forward to get a nearer look at me. "He says it all. I
have no other information."

"No, to be sure."

"Now, whether," pursued Herbert, "he had used the child's mother ill, or
whether he had used the child's mother well, Provis doesn't say; but she
had shared some four or five years of the wretched life he described
to us at this fireside, and he seems to have felt pity for her, and
forbearance towards her. Therefore, fearing he should be called upon to
depose about this destroyed child, and so be the cause of her death, he
hid himself (much as he grieved for the child), kept himself dark, as he
says, out of the way and out of the trial, and was only vaguely talked
of as a certain man called Abel, out of whom the jealousy arose. After
the acquittal she disappeared, and thus he lost the child and the
child's mother."

"I want to ask--"

"A moment, my dear boy, and I have done. That evil genius, Compeyson,
the worst of scoundrels among many scoundrels, knowing of his keeping
out of the way at that time and of his reasons for doing so, of course
afterwards held the knowledge over his head as a means of keeping him
poorer and working him harder. It was clear last night that this barbed
the point of Provis's animosity."

"I want to know," said I, "and particularly, Herbert, whether he told
you when this happened?"

"Particularly? Let me remember, then, what he said as to that. His
expression was, 'a round score o' year ago, and a'most directly after I
took up wi' Compeyson.' How old were you when you came upon him in the
little churchyard?"

"I think in my seventh year."

"Ay. It had happened some three or four years then, he said, and you
brought into his mind the little girl so tragically lost, who would have
been about your age."

"Herbert," said I, after a short silence, in a hurried way, "can you see
me best by the light of the window, or the light of the fire?"

"By the firelight," answered Herbert, coming close again.

"Look at me."

"I do look at you, my dear boy."

"Touch me."

"I do touch you, my dear boy."

"You are not afraid that