n't know what had
become of 'em. How 's Kit an' Joe?"

"They 're all right," was the reply. Skaggs could n't tell him, in this
the first hour of his freedom. Let him have time to drink the sweetness
of that all in. There would be time afterwards to taste all of the
bitterness.

Once in New York, he found that people wished to see him, some fools,
some philanthropists, and a great many reporters. He had to be
photographed--all this before he could seek those whom he longed to see.
They printed his picture as he was before he went to prison and as he
was now, a sort of before-and-after-taking comment, and in the morning
that it all appeared, when the _Universe_ spread itself to tell the
public what it had done and how it had done it, they gave him his wife's
address.

It would be better, they thought, for her to tell him herself all that
happened. No one of them was brave enough to stand to look in his eyes
when he asked for his son and daughter, and they shifted their
responsibility by pretending to themselves that they were doing it for
his own good: that the blow would fall more gently upon him coming from
her who had been his wife. Berry took the address and inquired his way
timidly, hesitatingly, but with a swelling heart, to the door of the
flat where Fannie lived.

XVIII

WHAT BERRY FOUND

Had not Berry's years of prison life made him forget what little he knew
of reading, he might have read the name Gibson on the door-plate where
they told him to ring for his wife. But he knew nothing of what awaited
him as he confidently pulled the bell. Fannie herself came to the door.
The news the papers held had not escaped her, but she had suffered in
silence, hoping that Berry might be spared the pain of finding her. Now
he stood before her, and she knew him at a glance, in spite of his
haggard countenance.

"Fannie," he said, holding out his arms to her, and all of the pain and
pathos of long yearning was in his voice, "don't you know me?"

She shrank away from him, back in the hall-way.

"Yes, yes, Be'y, I knows you. Come in."

She led him through the passage-way and into her room, he following with
a sudden sinking at his heart. This was not the reception he had
expected from Fannie.

When they were within the room he turned and held out his arms to her
again, but she did not notice them. "Why, is you 'shamed o' me?" he
asked brokenly.

"'Shamed? No! Oh, Be'y," and she sank into a chair and began