"Kindly have patience and you will see. One of his invariable habits was to visit every Sunday the old red prison in the woods beyond your house." Miss Gastonguay's head suddenly became more erect, though her fingers trifled nervously with her handkerchief. "I was often his companion. Among the prisoners I had many acquaintances. My father taught me not to despise these men whose unhappy lives had flung them for a time into such a place--" "He was wrong," said Miss Gastonguay, angrily. "Wrong--wrong." "Just before my father's death, he called me to his bedside, and told me that in leaving the world he had a sacred trust to impose on me. I would in his place be entrusted with the custody, the loaning, exchange, or issue of money for a certain individual whom I might hear from or see only at long intervals. This person I was to serve faithfully, without curiosity or suspicion, except in the improbable event of my being required to do anything that would be against my conscience." "Conscience!" ejaculated Miss Gastonguay. "You Puritans worship your consciences." "I accepted the trust," said Justin, "and I have kept it." "For some prison bird," she said, dilating her nostrils. "Your father always was soft-hearted. He believed a kind whisper in the ear would reform the prince of darkness himself." "It was four years after my father's death," continued Justin, "before I saw this stranger for whom my father was a kind of agent--" "I dare say," she said, sneeringly, "a wonder you ever saw him at all." "And then he reminded me, strangely enough, of a man I had once seen for a brief space of time in--" "The old prison, of course." "Yes." "And you told him of it," she said, tauntingly. "No, I did not. The last time I saw that man was in California six weeks ago." "An ill-starred journey. You had better have stayed at home." "I married that man's daughter, Miss Gastonguay." She paused for a moment, and caught her breath with a choking sound. Then she exclaimed, indignantly: "Shame to you to perpetuate the breed! Close that window, will you? You young people have your veins full of hot blood. We old ones grow chilly." Justin obediently closed it, then, reseating himself, gazed at her with a compassion and even a tenderness that her abusive words could neither change nor dissipate. "Yesterday, when I received that blow in the river," and he lightly touched his plastered forehead, "I seemed to see in a flash the possibilities of the future in case of my death. My young wife frightened and alone--" "Where is her father?" "He said that he was going to Australia; and I made up my mind yesterday to speak to you,--to tell you that, spoiled child as she may appear, she is a worthy daughter of your house." "What kind of a life is her father leading now?"