n to snore, she got up and went to the kitchen-fire,
kneeling down on the stone hearth: her head was on fire, and her body
cold.

"So they _shall_ be like him!" she whispered, with a fierce, baited
look, as if by her wife's trust in him she defied the whole world. "I
have kept my word. I've tried to make his sons what God made him in the
beginning."

That was true: she had kept her word. Five years ago, when the great
scandal came on the church in ----, and their minister was tried for
forgery, and sentenced to six years' imprisonment in the penitentiary,
the first letter his wife wrote to him there had these words: "For the
boys, my husband, they never shall know of this thing. They shall know
you as God and I do, Stephen. I'll make them men like you, if I can:
except in your religion; for I believe, before God, the Devil taught you
that."

When the man read that in his cell, a dry, quiet smile came over his
face. He had not expected such a keen opinion from his shallow,
easy-going wife: he did not think there was so much insight in her.

"It's a deep sounding you give, Martha, true or not," folding up the
letter. "And so the boys will never know?" going back to his solitary
cobbling, for they were making a shoemaker of him.

If there were any remorse under his quiet, or impatience at fate, or
gnawing homesickness, he did not show it. That was the last letter or
message that came from his wife. The friends of other prisoners were
admitted to visit them, but no one ever asked to see him; the five years
went by; every day the same bar of sunlight struck across his bench, and
glittered on the point of his awl, gray in winter, yellow in summer; but
no day brought a word or a sign from the outer world but that. The man
grew thin, mere skin and bone; but then he was scrofulous. He asked no
questions, ceased at last to look up, when the jailer brought his meals,
to see if he carried a letter. Sometimes, when he used to stand chafing
his stubbly chin in the evening at the slit cut in the stones for his
window, looking at the red brick chimney-pot he could see over the
penitentiary-wall, it seemed like something of outer life, and he would
mutter, "She said the boys would never know." Once, too, a year or two
after that, when the jailer came into "quiet Stevy's" cell, (for so he
nicknamed him,) Yarrow came up, and took him by the coat-buttons,
looking up and gabbling something about Martha and the little chaps in a
maudli