you,--near. I must have the paper. He is an old Shylock,
after all," with a desperate carelessness. "His soul would not weigh
heavily against me, if it were let out."

Yarrow passed his hand over his face; it was colorless. Yet he looked
bewildered. The bare thought of murder was not clear to him yet.

"Drink some wine, Stephen," said his brother, pouring out a goblet for
himself. "I carry my own drinking-apparatus. This Sherry"--

Yarrow tasted it, and put down the glass.

"I was cheated in it, eh?"

"Yes, you were."

"Your palate was always keener than mine. I"--

His mouth looked blue and cold under his whiskers: then they both stood
vacantly silent, while the woman sewed.

"Tut! we will look at the matter practically, as business-men," said
Soule at last, affecting a gruff, hearty tone, and walking about,--but
was silent there.

The convict did not answer. No sound but the rough wind without blowing
the drifted snow and pebbles from the asphalt roof against the frosted
panes, and the angry fire of bitumen within breaking into clefts of blue
and scarlet flame, thrusting its jets of fierce light out from its cage:
impatient, it may be, of this convict, this sickly, shrivelled bit of
humanity standing there; wondering the nauseated life in his nostrils or
soul claimed yet its share of God's breath. Society had taken the man
like a root torn out of native unctuous soil, kept it in a damp cellar,
hid out the breath and light. If after a while it withered away, whose
fault was it? If there were no hand now to plant it again, do you look
for it to grow rotten, or not? One would have said Soule was a root that
had been planted in fat, loamy ground, to look at him. There was a
healthy, liberal, lazy life for you! Yet the winter sky looked gray and
dumb when he passed the window, and the fire-light broke fiercest
against his bluff figure going to and fro. No matter; something there
that would have warmed your heart to him: something genial, careless,
big-natured, from the loose red hair to the indolent, portly stride.
"Who knows? A comfortable, true-hearted, merry clergyman,--a jolly
farmer, with open house, and a bit of good racing-stock in the
stable,--if bigotry in his boyhood, and this woman, had not crossed him.
They had crossed him: there was not an atom of unpolluted nature left:
you saw the taint in every syllable he spoke. Fresh and malignant
to-night, when this tempted soul hung in the balance.

"We're