rs
the shrill, sharp voices of the convicts rapping out their foul and
frightful oaths.

He leaped to his feet, with a muttered oath on his own lips, and when
the imagined agony with which he surprised himself had given way to a
new sense of his actual sufferings, his heart grew yet more cold and
bitter. He thought of what he had been and of what he was. There could
be no disguising the truth--he was a worse man. Yes; whatsoever had once
been pure in him, whatsoever had once been generous, whatsoever had once
been of noble aspiration, was now impure, and ungenerous, and ignoble.
Above all else, he had lost that tenderness which is the top and crown
of a strong man. He felt as if the world had lifted its hand against
him, and as if he were ready and eager to strike back.

They reached Penrith toward four in the morning, and then the carriage
in which they traveled was shunted on to the branch line to await the
first train toward Cockermouth. The day was breaking. From the window
Paul Ritson could see vaguely the few ruins of the castle. That familiar
object touched him strangely. He hardly knew why, but he felt that a
hard lump at his heart melted away. By and by the brakeman shouted to
the signalman in the gray silence of the morning. The words were
indifferent--only some casual message--but they were spoken in the broad
Cumbrian that for a year and a half had never once fallen on Paul
Ritson's ear. Then the lump that had melted as his heart seemed to rise
to his throat.

The gray light become intermingled with red, and soon the sky to the
east was aflame. Paul let down the carriage window, and long waves of
sweet mountain air, laden with the smell of peat, flowed in upon him.
His lips parted and his breast expanded. At five o'clock the engine was
attached. A few carriages were added at the platform, and these
contained a number of pitmen, in their red-stained fustian, going down
for the morning shift. When the train moved westward, the sun had
risen, and all the air was musical with the songs of the birds. Very
soon the train ran in among the mountains, and then at last the
bitterness of Paul Ritson's heart seemed to fall away from him like a
garment. That quick thrill of soul which comes when the mountains are
first seen after a long absence is a rapture known to the mountaineer
alone. Paul saw his native hills towering up to the sky, the white mists
flying off their bald crown, the torrents leaping down their bran