we did we--I mean the profession--thought it just as well to say
nothing. The governor remembered to have read a letter from Goddard's
wife, just telling him where she was living, about two years ago. Being
harmless, he passed it and never copied the address; then he could not
remember it. At last they found it in his cell, hidden away somehow. The
beggar had kept it."

"Poor fellow!" exclaimed Mr. Juxon. In the silence which followed, the
sound of wheels was heard outside. Doctor Longstreet had arrived.

CHAPTER XXIII.

While Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose were together in the library downstairs, while
John Short was waking from the short sleep he had enjoyed, and while the
squire was listening in the study to Mr. Booley's graphic account of the
convict's escape, Mrs. Goddard was alone with her husband, watching every
movement and listening intently to every moaning breath he drew.

In the desperate anxiety for his fate, she forgot herself and seemed no
longer to feel fatigue or exhaustion from all she herself had suffered.
She stood long by his bedside, hoping that he might recognise her and yet
fearing the moment when he should recover his senses. Then she noticed
that the morning sun was pouring in through the window and she drew a
curtain across, to shade his eyes from the glare. Whether the sudden
changing of the light affected Goddard, as it does sometimes affect
persons in the delirium of a brain fever, or whether it was only a
natural turn in his condition, she never knew. His expression changed and
acquired that same look of strange intelligence which John Short had
noticed in the night; the flush sank from his forehead and gave place to
a luminous, transparent colour, his eyelids once more moved naturally,
and he looked at his wife as she stood beside him, and recognised her. He
was weaker now than when he had spoken with John Short six hours earlier,
but he was more fully in possession of his faculties for a
brief moment. Mary Goddard trembled and felt her hands turn cold with
excitement.

"Walter, do you know me now?" she asked very softly.

"Yes," he said faintly, and closed his eyes. She laid her hand upon his
forehead; the coldness of it seemed pleasant to him, for a slight smile
flickered over his face.

"You are better, I think," she said again, gazing intently at him.

"Mary--it is Mary?" he murmured, slowly opening his eyes and looking up
to her. "Yes--I know you--I have been dreaming a long ti