The terrible sufferings Saul had endured during six months of imprisonment were too clearly written on his face to evade observation. What such incarceration meant to one of his nature and training can only be realised by those who have lived the life he had hitherto led, and have been out in the open air from dawn till dark every day of their lives, summer and winter, from boyhood. Bride shrank back as she saw his face, with a sense akin almost to terror; but then her sense of Divine compassion and tenderness for the wild impenitent prisoner came back with a bound, and she put out her little gloved hand and laid it on his arm. “Saul, I have been so sorry for you, so very sorry,” she said, softly and gently. “But it is over now, and you have life still before you. You will learn to----” “To forget? never!” interrupted he, with a strange flash in his eyes. “I will never forget, ay! and never forgive, to the end of my days. Stacked like pigs in a stye, crowded together in hunger and dirt, and wretchedness unspeakable, the best man amongst them hanged by the neck till he died, and all for preaching the gospel of truth to a down-trodden people, that is what England has to look for from her rulers! That is what we have to look forward to who strive to raise our brothers from abject misery and degradation. Forget! No, I will never forget. I will avenge those months of misery, and the death of my best and truest friend; ay! I _will_ avenge it on the proud heads of the tyrants of this land. Don’t come near me, don’t speak to me, Lady Bride. I would not hurt you willingly; but there is that within me that may prompt me to do you a mischief if you stand there much longer. Go, I say, go! You are a woman; I believe you are a good and a merciful woman; but you come of a race that is doomed. Go, let me never see you here again! Look to yourself, and let your father look to himself, for they have made a Cain and an Ishmaelite of me; and I will be in very truth what they have made me. I will give them cause to tremble!” But Bride looked at him with quiet fearlessness, sorrowful, yet not afraid. That the fever and weakness, combined with long months of brooding and suffering, had partially clouded his brain, she could well understand. His threats did not alarm her. She knew he would never lay a finger upon her. “I am very grieved for you, Saul,” she said again. “It has been very hard to bear, and the more so because all the while you believed you were doing right. That is what is so hard to understand in this world--how to do right without doing wrong too; and there is only one Power that can help us to know that. I hope some day you will learn to know that Power, and see with unclouded eyes. Meantime, if you will let me, I should like to help you and to be your friend. I think you know that you may trust me, even though you may not be able to help hating me.”