rm, have I?' he added quickly.

'None before Heaven,' she answered.

'Why then,' said Barnaby, 'let them do their worst. You told me
once--you--when I asked you what death meant, that it was nothing to
be feared, if we did no harm--Aha! mother, you thought I had forgotten
that!'

His merry laugh and playful manner smote her to the heart. She drew him
closer to her, and besought him to talk to her in whispers and to be
very quiet, for it was getting dark, and their time was short, and she
would soon have to leave him for the night.

'You will come to-morrow?' said Barnaby.

Yes. And every day. And they would never part again.

He joyfully replied that this was well, and what he wished, and what he
had felt quite certain she would tell him; and then he asked her where
she had been so long, and why she had not come to see him when he had
been a great soldier, and ran through the wild schemes he had had for
their being rich and living prosperously, and with some faint notion in
his mind that she was sad and he had made her so, tried to console and
comfort her, and talked of their former life and his old sports and
freedom: little dreaming that every word he uttered only increased her
sorrow, and that her tears fell faster at the freshened recollection of
their lost tranquillity.

'Mother,' said Barnaby, as they heard the man approaching to close the
cells for the night,' when I spoke to you just now about my father you
cried "Hush!" and turned away your head. Why did you do so? Tell me why,
in a word. You thought HE was dead. You are not sorry that he is alive
and has come back to us. Where is he? Here?'

'Do not ask any one where he is, or speak about him,' she made answer.

'Why not?' said Barnaby. 'Because he is a stern man, and talks roughly?
Well! I don't like him, or want to be with him by myself; but why not
speak about him?'

'Because I am sorry that he is alive; sorry that he has come back;
and sorry that he and you have ever met. Because, dear Barnaby, the
endeavour of my life has been to keep you two asunder.'

'Father and son asunder! Why?'

'He has,' she whispered in his ear, 'he has shed blood. The time has
come when you must know it. He has shed the blood of one who loved him
well, and trusted him, and never did him wrong in word or deed.'

Barnaby recoiled in horror, and glancing at his stained wrist for an
instant, wrapped it, shuddering, in his dress.

'But,' she added hastily as the key t