uiet. There was not much in the years gone to soften his thought, as
it grew desperate and cruel: there was oppression and vice heaped on
him, and flung back out of his bitter heart. Nor much in the future: a
blank stretch of punishment to the end. He was an old man: was it easy
to bear? What if he were black? what if he were born a thief? what if
all the sullen revenge of his nature had made him an outcast from the
poorest poor? Was there no latent good in this soul for which Christ
died, that a kind hand might not have brought to life?

None? Something, I think, struggled up in the touch of his hand,
catching the skirt of his child's dress, when it came near him, with
the timid tenderness of a mother touching her dead baby's hair,--as
something holy, far off, yet very near: something in his old
crime-marked face,--a look like this dog's, putting his head on my
knee,--a dumb, unhelpful love in his eyes, and the slow memory of a
wrong done to his soul in a day long past. A wrong to both, you say,
perhaps; but if so, irreparable, and never to be recompensed. Never?

"Yoh must go, my little girl," he said at last.

Whatever he did must be done quickly. She came up, combing the thin
gray hairs through her fingers.

"Father, I dunnot understan' what it is, rightly. But stay with
me,--stay, father!"

"Yoh've a many frien's, Lo," he said, with a keen flash of jealousy.
"Ther' 's none like yoh,--none."

"Father, look here."

She put her misshapen head and scarred face down on his hand, where he
could see them. If it had ever hurt her to be as she was, if she had
ever compared herself bitterly with fair, beloved women, she was glad
now, and thankful, for every fault and deformity that brought her
nearer to him, and made her dearer.

"They're kind, but ther' 's not many loves me with true love, like yoh.
Stay, father! Bear it out, whatever it be. Th' good time 'll come,
father."

He kissed her, saying nothing, and went with her down the street. When
he left her, she waited, and, creeping back, hid near the mill. God
knows what vague dread was in her brain; but she came back to watch and
help.

Old Yare wandered through the great loom rooms of the mill with but one
fact clear in his cloudy, faltering perception,--that above him the man
lay quietly sleeping who would bring worse than death on him to-morrow.
Up and down, aimlessly, with his stoker's torch in hand, going over the
years gone and the years