“Sir, can you believe a wretch like me has any heart left? I didn’t think it myself, but you’ve got down to it at last. I’ll plead guilty—though once I thought that ten thousand devils couldn’t drive me to it; but you’ve broke me down completely; I can never hold up my head again, and I deserve the very worst they can give me I’d like it over with and settled as soon as possible after _she_ has been here. She’ll not stay long, probably. I’m well enough not to be a burden here any longer, and I’d feel easier in my mind to know just what is before me.” The poor fellow was frightfully pale, and so excited that his sentences were disjointed and broken, and spoken through teeth so tightly shut that Earle could hear them grate. The young marquis was deeply affected; he had uttered no fawning or servile protestations of sorrow or shame, asked for no mercy, expected none; but he could see that he was, as he said “completely broken down;” his heart had been melted by kindness, and little shoots of the original good that was in him had begun to spring up in the unusual atmosphere by which he had recently been surrounded. Earle believed that a great and radical change was begun in the man, and, if rightly dealt with now, he might be saved. Kindness had melted him; then why had he not a right to feel that kindness would hold him and mold him anew? His was undoubtedly one of those natures which grow reckless and harden itself against everything like stern justice and punishment, and only grow more desperate at the thought of penalty. If tried and sentenced now for the attempt at robbery, even though he might protest himself deserving of it, yet he would go to his doom in dogged, sullen silence; nothing would ever reach his better nature again, and he would die as miserable as he had lived. “Tom,” Earle said, gravely, after a thoughtful silence, during which these things had passed through his mind, “from what you say, I judge that you regret your past life, and, if you were to live it over again, you would spend it very differently.” “Regrets won’t do me any good, and I don’t like to cry for quarter when I’m only getting my just deserts,” he said, with a kind of reckless bravery; then he added, with a heavy sigh that spoke volumes: “But I think it would be sort of comforting to a chap if he could look back and feel that he’d _tried_ to live like a—_man_.” “Then why not try to live like a ‘man’ in the future?” Earle said, earnestly, his fine face glowing with a noble purpose. “Transportation for life isn’t likely to give a body much courage for anything,” the man answered, moodily, his face hardening at the thought. “No; and I hope no such evil will ever overtake you to discourage you, if you really have a desire to mend your course. Tom, you expect that I am going to arraign you before a tribunal, and have you punished for the wrong you have done me; but—I am going to do no such thing.”