n sort of way,--then, with a silly laugh, lay down on his pallet.

"I never felt sorry for the little whiffet before," said the fat jailer,
when he came out. "He's so close; but it's a cursed shame in his people
to give him the go-by that way,--there!"

But when he went back an hour or two after, he found he had gained no
ground with Stevy; he was dry, silent as ever: he had come to himself,
meanwhile, and shivered with disgust at the fear that any madness had
made him commit himself to this mass of flesh.

"'Mortised with the sacred garlic,'" he muttered, with the usual dry
twinkle in his eyes.

Ben caught the last word.

"It's a good yarb, garlic," he said, confusedly. "Uses it on hot coals
mostly, under broilin' steaks. Well, good night.--He's a queer chap,
though," after he had gone out,--"beyond me."

Five years being gone, Martha Yarrow, sitting by her fire to-night,
could only repeat the words of her letter. She had taken out a
daguerreotype of her husband, and was looking at it. He was a small man;
young; dressed in a suit of rusty black, with a certain subdued,
credulous, incomplete air about him, like a man forced at birth into
some iron mould of circumstance, and whose own proper muscles and soul
had never had a chance of air to grow. A homely, saddened, uncouthly
shaped face,--one that would be sure to go snubbed and unread through
the world, to find at last some woman who would know its latent meaning,
and worship it with the heat of passion which this country-girl had
given. Withal, a cheerful, quizzical smile on the lips. Poor Martha's
eyes filled, the moment she looked at that; and so she went back to her
first years of married life, full of keen, relishing enjoyment, all
coming from him, quiet, silent as he was,--remembering how her maddest
freaks were indulged with that same odd, dry laugh. She stood alone now.

"And in these years I have grown used to being alone,"--standing up,
stretching her arms suddenly above her head, and letting them fall
again.

It was a lie: she knew that the tired sinking within her of body and
soul was harder to bear now than the day he went away, and she weaker to
bear it. If she could but lean her head on his breast for one moment,
and feel him pat her hair with the old "Tut! tut! why, what ails my
girl?" it would give her more strength than all her prayers. She
couldn't think of herself as anything but a girl, when she remembered
her husband: these years were not