his friends. He was to leave by the
evening's boat; and the Cottage was for the present to be deserted,
except by Margery.

Mr. Strafford was admitted with, if possible, even less hesitation than
usual to Christian's room. Every one understood now that the prisoner
was entirely innocent, and in the revulsion of feeling, every one was
disposed to treat with all tenderness and honour as a martyr the very
man who, if he had never been falsely accused, they would probably have
regarded only with disgust or contempt.

Not that there was room for either feeling _now_. It was as if this
man's history had been written from beginning to end, and then the ink
washed from all the middle pages. What memory he had left, went back to
the days when he had been a pupil of the Jesuit priests, and the traces
of that time remained with him, and were evident to all. But all was
blank from those days to these, when he lay in the wintry sunshine
dying, and scarcely conscious that he was dying in a prison. When a
voice out of that forgotten past spoke to him, his recollection seemed
to revive for a moment, and he answered in English or in Ojibway, as he
was addressed. At other times, if he began to speak at all, it was in
French, the most familiar language of his boyhood, and sometimes scraps
of the old priestly Latin would come to his lips as he lay half dozing,
and dreaming perhaps of his life in the mission-school, and the time
when he was to have been a teacher of his own people. Chiefly, however,
he lay quite silent, and seemed neither to see nor to hear what took
place around him. His face, where the hand of death was already
visible, had more of its original beauty than Mr. Strafford had ever
seen on it before; and as he came near to the bedside, he for the first
time began to comprehend, what had always till now been an enigma to
him, why Mary Wynter had loved and married her husband.

Christian roused himself little when he perceived his visitor, and Mr.
Strafford seized the opportunity of speaking to him on the subject of
his imprisonment, as a step towards the great news he had to tell.

"You will be glad," he said, "when you can go away from here. It will be
very soon now, perhaps."

"No," was the answer. "I do not want to go now. If they could take away
a large piece of that wall," he went on dreamily, "so that I could
breathe and see the sky, that is all I care for now."

"You would like, however, to know that you _can_ go