It was hailed with joy, in the still house, when word came, that at the last hour he was pardoned, and that his wife was to meet him on board the vessel that was to take them both to the new life, to which they had pledged themselves. Poor Gabrielle was half reluctant, but she was trying to be good, and was in earnest, in a childish sort of way. St. John looked rather pale and worn after that, and came to Yellowcoats to recruit for a day or two, or perhaps to see after Missy. His work had lain principally among "wicked people," as he had proposed to himself in early days. For some reason he made himself acceptable to prisoners and outcasts. It is possible his great humility had as much to do with it, as his sympathetic nature. At all events, he had had plenty to do, and was quite familiar in prison cells, and at work-house deathbeds. When this man (Armand) had come under his care, he was under sentence of death, and was probably the wickedest of all his wicked people. He was a foreigner, with a hideous past--how hideous, it was likely none but St. John knew. He was condemned to suffer the penalty of the law, for a murder committed in a bar-room fray, possibly one of the lightest of the sins of his life. It was he who had ruined the life of poor little Jay's mother, and plotted the death of her husband. He was a desperado, a dramatic villain, the sort of man respectable people rarely meet, except on the stage or in police courts. St. John had not suspected the identity of his penitent with the man to whom he owed it, that he wore a girdle round his waist, till the day that Gabrielle came into the church. Poor Gabrielle! It was hard lines for her to be sent off with the cowardly villain, but there seemed no other way to settle the fate of both of them, considering that they were married to each other. A lingering pity filled St. John's heart when he thought of her, and of the terrible fate to which she had bound herself. All this sort of thing is exhausting to the nerves, and no one could begrudge St. John his day and a half of rest by Yellowcoats bay. He and his fellow-workers took very few such days. Their hands were quite full of work, not of a sentimental kind. It takes money to send criminals and their families away to lead new lives in new lands, and money does not always come for the wishing. It takes time and the expenditure of thought to prepare men for the gallows, to get their pardons for them if may be, to smoothe their paths, whichever way they lead; it is good hard work to do these things, and many like them, and takes the flesh off men's bones, and wears out nerves and brains almost as effectually as stocks and speculations But there are men who choose to work in obscurity in a service for which the world offers them no wages--only a very stiff contempt. CHAPTER XXIX. SURRENDER.