built up a scheme of prison government, and I said to myself, 'When
he comes out, he'll write a book, and good will come of it, and then we
shall see that, under Providence, my son went to prison that he might do
that.'"

He was uplifted with the wonder of it. The girls felt themselves carried
along at an equal pace. This was it, they thought. It was a part of the
providences that make life splendid. Jeffrey had been martyred that he
might do a special work.

"Oh, no," said he, plainly bored by the inference. "That's not it. I'm
going to write the life of a fellow I know."

"Who was he?" Anne asked, with a serious uplift of her brows.

"A defaulter."

"In the Federal Prison?"

"Yes."

VI

He looked at them, quite unconscious of the turmoil he had wakened in
them. Lydia was ready to sound the top note of revolt. Her thoughts were
running a definite remonstrance: "Write the life of another man when you
should be getting your evidence together and proving your own innocence
and the injustice of the law?" Anne was quite ready to believe there
must be a cogent reason for writing the life of his fellow criminal, but
she wished it were not so. She, too, from long habit of thought, wanted
Jeffrey to attend to his own life now he had a chance. The colonel, she
knew, through waiting and hoping, had fallen into an attitude of mind as
wistful and expectant as hers and Lydia's. The fighting qualities, it
seemed, had been ground out of him. The fostering ones had grown
disproportionately, and sometimes, she was sure, they made him ache, in
a dull way, with ruth for everybody.

"Did the man ask you to write his life?" he inquired.

"No," said Jeffrey. "I asked him if I could. He agreed to it. Said I
might use his name. He's no family to squirm under it."

"You feel he was unjustly sentenced," the colonel concluded.

"Oh, no. He doesn't either. He mighty well deserved what he got. Been
better perhaps if he'd got more. What I had in mind was to tell how a
man came to be a robber."

Lydia winced at the word. Jeffrey had been commonly called a defaulter,
and she was imperfectly reconciled to that: certainly not to a branding
more ruthless still.

"I've watched him a good deal," said Jeffrey. "We've had some talk
together. I can see how he did what he did, and how he'd do it again.
It'll be a study in criminology."

"When does he--come out?" Anne hesitated over this. She hardly knew a
term without offence.

"N