heir heads on the table and wept. I am sure that
before that tempest of emotion was over, it must have washed from
Blant's heart some of its awful burden.

I slipped out and ran to the hospital for a nursing bottle and some
milk, that Blant might feed the poor little starving babe. Oh how
bright, how joyous, how pitiable, was the smile upon her tiny, pinched
face as she laid aside her bottle repeatedly to assure herself by touch
and sight that Blant still held her.

Late in the afternoon, when I begged to keep the babe during the night,
Blant shook his head, and clasped her more strongly to his heart.

_Sunday Night._

When Nucky and I stopped at the jail after church to-day, the keeper
told us Blant had sat up all night with the babe in his arms. "'Peared
like he couldn't part with her a' instant," he said; "I allow if
anything can splice him on to life again, it will be her."

This raised my hopes. I saw now that Nucky had brought her for a double
reason.

"May she stay here with him a while?" I asked.

"Certainly," he said; "of course it's again' the rules; but what's rules
when a pore little innocent babe is pining to death?"

But when we spoke to Blant, our hopes were dashed to the ground. He said
sternly, "No, it can't be,--Nucky never ought to have brung her,--she
must be took back immediate. In a little while more she'd have forgot
me,--little young things like that can't have no very long
recollections. Now, God help her, she'll have to start all over again.
But it has to be,--it would be pure cruelty to keep her here and get her
all wropped up in me again, only to face a' eternal parting."

The keeper pondered silently for quite a while; then he spoke up,
firmly. "Blant," he said, "I got a confession to make to you, and pardon
to ax of you, for what I have done. In the pity and tenderness of my
heart, I have lied to you, and led you on to hope for a death sentence,
when God knows there haint the ghost of a show you'll git one. In the
first place, if you'll ricollect, there's a powerful prejudyce again'
hanging in this country; in the next, I am sorry to tell you you haint
done nothing to really earn the gallows. Everybody knows how it was
betwixt you and Rich; and as for Todd and Elhannon and Ben and Jeems
that you kilt, and t'other Cheevers you wounded, why, that war is a
family affair, in which the law haint got no particular call, or no
great desire, to meddle, and wouldn't if you hadn't a-