xpression. At the
moment he saw no more than an excited, bewildered face, but afterwards
this face came and went before him, flashing in and out of dark places
in a kind of mockery.

As he went from the court-room another woman made her way to him in
spite of the guards. It was the Little Chemist's wife, who, years
before, had been his father's housekeeper, who knew him when his eyes
first opened on the world.

"My poor Blaze! my poor Blaze!" she said, clasping his manacled hands.

In prison he refused to see all visitors, even Medallion, the Little
Chemist's wife, and the good Father Fabre. Letters, too, he refused to
accept and read. He had no contact, wished no contact with the outer
world, but lived his hard, lonely life by himself, silent, studious--for
now books were a pleasure to him. He had entered his prison a wild,
excitable, dissipated youth, and he had become a mature brooding man.
Five years had done the work of twenty.

The face of the woman who looked at him so strangely in the court-room
haunted him so that at last it became a part of his real life, lived
largely at the window where he looked out at the pigeons on the roof of
the hospital.

"She was sorry for me," he said many a time to himself. He was shaken
with misery often, so that he rocked to and fro as he sat on his
bed, and a warder heard him cry out even in the last days of his
imprisonment:

"O God, canst Thou do everything but speak!" And again: "That hour--the
memory of that hour, in exchange for my ruined life!"

One day the gaoler came to him and said: "Monsieur Turgeon, you are
free. The Governor has cut off five years from your sentence."

Then he was told that people were waiting without--Medallion, the Little
Chemist and his wife, and others more important. But he would not go
to meet them, and he stepped into the open world alone at dawn the next
morning, and looked out upon a still sleeping village. Suddenly there
stood before him a woman, who had watched by the prison gates all night;
and she put out her hand in entreaty, and said with a breaking voice:
"You are free at last!"

He remembered her--the woman who had looked at him so anxiously and
sorrowfully in the court-room. "Why did you come to meet me?" he asked.

"I was sorry for you."

"But that is no reason."

"I once committed a crime," she whispered, with shrinking bitterness.

"That's bad," he said. "Were you punished?" He looked at her keenly,
almost fiercel