The child suddenly burst out crying; her sobs, loud and unrestrained,
fell painfully on Hubert's ear.

"I went to the prison to see him, but they would not let me; and then I
came back here."

She sobbed for a minute or two longer, and then became quiet as suddenly
as she had broken into tears, rubbing her eyes with one hand, and
peering furtively at Hubert between the black fingers.

"They were wrong," Hubert said at length. "Your father is not dead; he
is not to be hanged at all." He paused before he spoke again. "He is in
prison; he will be in prison for the rest of his life--a life sentence!"

He spoke rather to himself than to the child. Never had he realised so
fully as at that moment what prison actually meant. To be shut up, away
from friends, away from home, away from the sweet wild woods, the
country air, the summer sun, to labor all day long at some heavy
monotonous task, such as breaks the spirit and the heart of man with its
relentless uniformity of toil--to wear the prison garb, to be known by a
number, as one dead to the ordinary life of men, leaving at the prison
gates that name which would be henceforth only a badge of disgrace to
all who bore it in the outer world--these aspects of Andrew Westwood's
sad case flashed in a moment across Hubert Lepel's mind with a thrill of
intolerable pain. What could he do? Rise up and offer to bear that
terrible punishment himself? It could not be--for Florence's sake, he
told himself, it could not be. And yet--yet---- Would that at the very
beginning he had told the truth, and stood where Andrew Westwood stood,
so that the ruffian and the poacher might not have to bear a doom that
separated him for ever from his only child!

"Do you mean," said Jenny Westwood slowly, "that father will never come
out of prison any more?"

"Perhaps--after many years--he may come out."

"Many years? Three--or five?"

"More--more, I am afraid, my little girl--perhaps in twenty years--if he
is still alive."

He scarcely knew what impulse prompted him then to tell her the truth.
He repented it the next moment, for, after a horrified stare into his
face, the child suddenly flung herself down upon the gravelled path and
burst into tears, accompanied by passionate shrieking sobs and wild
convulsive movements of her limbs.

"He shall come out--he shall come out!" Hubert heard her cry between her
gasps for breath. "He can't do without me. Take me to him, or I shall
die!"

In utte