your best interests; but while you're making up your mind don't
leave the little woman out. I shall see her at dinner to-night, and
she'll want to know what's what. I'm going to give her your love and
tell her you're trying mighty hard to be reasonable. Is that right?"

XXIV

Restoration

At the clanging of the cell door behind the departing lawyer I was to all
intents and purposes a broken reed. The theorists may say what they
please about the fine and courageous quality of resolution which rises
only the higher the harder it is beaten down; but man is human, and there
are limits beyond which the finest resiliency becomes dead and brittle
and there is no rebound.

The temptation to yield was both subtle and compelling. Reason, the kind
of reason which scoffs at ideals, told me that I was foolish to fight for
a principle. On the one hand there were sharp misery, the loss of
freedom, poverty and suffering for Polly: on the other, liberty and a
generous degree of affluence. We could hide ourselves, Polly and I, in
some remote corner of the world where no one knew; and our share of the
five millions, wealth even as wealth is reckoned in the day of wealth,
would put us far enough beyond the reach of want; nay, it would do
more--it would silence the gossiping tongues if there were any to wag.

Up and down the narrow limits of my cell I paced, praying at one moment
for strength to hold out to the end, and at the next cursing myself for
an idiotic splitter of hairs helpless to break away from the manaclings
of an idea. Love, reason, common sense were all ranged on the side of
the compromise with principle; and opposed to them there was only the
stubborn protest against injustice pleading feebly and despairingly for
its final hearing.

In the midst of the struggle the kitchen "trusty" brought the mid-day
meal, and for the first time in forty-eight hours I forced myself to eat.
A sound body, weakened only by anxiety and abstinence, is quick to
respond to a resumption of the normal. Under the food stimulus I felt
better, stronger. But now the strength was all on the side of yielding.
With the quickening pulses came the keen lust of life. To live, to be
free, to enjoy, in the years, few or many, of the little earthly span:
after all, these were the only realities.

Whitredge had left his fountain pen, and the papers--the letter to
Barrett and Gifford and the petition--were lying on the cot where I had
thro