"Only I kind of thought, we all
thought, you had such plans."

"Well, they served their turn," interrupted Miss Hannah briskly. "They
amused me and kept me interested till something real would come in
their place. If I'd had to carry them out I dare say they'd have
bothered me a lot. Things are more comfortable as they are. I'm happy
as a bird, Jacob."

"Oh, sure," said Jacob. He pondered the business deeply all the way
back home, but could make nothing of it.

"But I ain't obliged to," he concluded sensibly. "Miss Hannah's
satisfied and happy and it's nobody else's concern. However, I call it
a curious thing."

The Redemption of John Churchill

John Churchill walked slowly, not as a man walks who is tired, or
content to saunter for the pleasure of it, but as one in no haste to
reach his destination through dread of it. The day was well on to late
afternoon in mid-spring, and the world was abloom. Before him and
behind him wound a road that ran like a red ribbon through fields of
lush clovery green. The orchards scattered along it were white and
fragrant, giving of their incense to a merry south-west wind;
fence-corner nooks were purple with patches of violets or golden-green
with the curly heads of young ferns. The roadside was sprinkled over
with the gold dust of dandelions and the pale stars of wild strawberry
blossoms. It seemed a day through which a man should walk lightly and
blithely, looking the world and his fellows frankly in the face, and
opening his heart to let the springtime in.

But John Churchill walked laggingly, with bent head. When he met other
wayfarers or was passed by them, he did not lift his face, but only
glanced up under his eyebrows with a furtive look that was replaced by
a sort of shamed relief when they had passed on without recognizing
him. Some of them he knew for friends of the old time. Ten years had
not changed them as he had been changed. They had spent those ten
years in freedom and good repute, under God's blue sky, in His glad
air and sunshine. He, John Churchill, had spent them behind the walls
of a prison.

His close-clipped hair was grey; his figure, encased in an ill-fitting
suit of coarse cloth, was stooped and shrunken; his face was deeply
lined; yet he was not an old man in years. He was only forty; he was
thirty when he had been convicted of embezzling the bank funds for
purposes of speculation and had been sent to prison, leaving behind a
wife and father