esh in people's minds Jem and
I were not by way of being admitted to "grown-up" conversations; and
though Mrs. Wood's husband and I became intimate friends, I neither
wished nor dared to ask him more about his past than he chose to tell,
for I knew enough to know that it must be a most intolerable pain to
recall it.

What we had all heard of the story was this. Mr. Wood had been a head
clerk in a house of business. A great forgery was committed against his
employers, and he was accused. He was tried, condemned, and sentenced to
fourteen years' penal servitude, which, in those days, meant
transportation abroad. For some little time the jury had not been
unanimous. One man doubted the prisoner's guilt--the man we afterwards
knew as the old miser of Walnut-tree Farm. But he was over-persuaded at
last, and Mr. Wood was convicted and sentenced. He had spent ten years
of his penal servitude in Bermuda when a man lying in Maidstone Jail
under sentence of death for murder, confessed (amongst other crimes of
which he disburdened his conscience) that it was he, and not the man who
had been condemned, who had committed the forgery. Investigation
confirmed the truth of this statement, and Mr. Wood was "pardoned" and
brought home.

He had just come. He was the tramp.

In this life the old miser never knew that his first judgment had been
the just one, but the doubt which seems always to have haunted
him--whether he had not helped to condemn the innocent--was the reason
of his bequest to the convict's wife, and explained much of the
mysterious wording of the will.

It was a tragic tale, and gave a terrible interest to the gaunt,
white-haired, shattered-looking man who was the hero of it. It had one
point of special awe for me, and I used to watch him in church and think
of it, till I am ashamed to say that I forgot even when to stand up and
sit down. He had served ten years of his sentence. Ten years! Ten times
three hundred and sixty-five days! All the days of the years of my life.
The weight of that undeserved punishment had fallen on him the year that
I was born, and all that long, long time of home with Mother and Father
and Jem--all the haymaking summers and snowballing winters--whilst Jem
and I had never been away from home, and had had so much fun, and
nothing very horrid that I could call to mind except the mumps--he had
been an exile working in chains. I remember rousing up with a start from
the realization of this one