uiet blue eye, unutterably kind and sad: a slow,
compelling face, that would look on his life barely, day after day, year
after year, never drowsing over its sore or pain until he had wrung its
full meaning out to the last dregs.

"All you want? Clothing? food?" stammered Soule,--something in the face
having stopped his garrulous breath. "I did not say that, Stephen."

The wind struck sharper on the rattling panes; the yellow and brown
heats grew deeper. One saw how it was then. No beggar turned from God so
empty-handed as this man to-day. His place in the world slipped: his
chance gone: sick, sinking; his brain mad for knowledge: his hands
stretched out for work: no man to give it to him: whatever God he had
lost to him: the thief's smell, he thought, on every breath he drew,
every rag of clothes he wore. Hundreds of convicts leave our
prison-doors with souls as hungry and near death as this.

"I have lost something--since I went in there," he said, jerking his
thumb over his shoulder. "I do not think it will ever come back."

"No?"

Soule put his big hand to his face mechanically.

"Don't say that, boy! I know--The world has gone on, it has left you
behind--You"--

He choked,--could not go on: he would have put half the strength and
life in himself into Yarrow's lank little body that moment, if he could.
There was a something else lost, different from all these, of which they
both thought, but they did not speak of it. The convict looked out into
the night. Beyond the square patch of window and that near dark, how
full the world was of happy homes getting ready for Christmas! children
and happy wives! Soule understood.

"I don't say I can bring you back what you have lost, Stephen. I offer
you the best I can. You're not an old man,--barely thirty: you must have
years to acquire fresh bone and muscle. Set your brain to work,
meanwhile. Give it a chance."

"It never had one," said the convict, with a queer, faint smile.

"Hillo! that looks like old times!" brightening up. "No, it never had.
Do you think I forget our alley-house with its three rooms? the
carpentering by day, and the arithmetic by night? the sweltering, sultry
Sunday mornings in church, and the afternoons sniffling over the
catechism among the rain-butts in the back-yard? Do you remember the
preachers, the travelling agents, that put up with us? how they snarled
at other churches, and helped themselves out of the shop, as if to be a
man of God