For a few moments he was in an agony of excitement, which shook him like a reed. Then he grew very calm. God would save him and all would yet be well. Moving his cot in front of the window he lay down upon it, tired but sleepless. The star which had shone upon him earlier in the evening was still looking at him, with another near it. The higher and brighter, flashing as it shone, he likened to Clarice; the lower and softer, shining with a pure, steady light, was Elithe, whose eyes had often looked at him steadily and quietly as this star shone upon him now, bringing a sensation of rest and indifference to what had happened or might happen in the future. Thoughts of Jack came to him in his loneliness. Poor Jack! Cut off so suddenly. How he wished he hadn’t been angry with him that morning at the hotel, and wished, too, that he had found him in the woods when looking for him. In the confusion which followed Jack’s death he had scarcely had time to think much of John Pennington, the hero of Deep Gulch, but now, with Elithe’s star looking at him, he remembered the scene in Miss Hansford’s rooms when Elithe knelt by the dying man, whose last thoughts were for her,—whose last word was her name, spoken as he, Paul, might speak Clarice’s, if he knew he were dying. Elithe had disclaimed all love for Jack, saying he had only been her friend. “But Jack loved her, and this must influence her in her opinion of me. I wish I could see her and talk with her about it,” he thought, still watching the two stars. That of Elithe was a little dim, with a fleecy cloud over it, but that of Clarice was bright as ever. “Poor Clarice, who was to have been a bride last week! I am so sorry for her,” he said, forgetting Elithe at last and thinking only of Clarice until he heard a clock strike one. He had not slept. He didn’t feel as if he could ever sleep again, but after an hour of tossing on his hard bed, which grew harder every minute, he fell into a heavy slumber, from which he did not waken until the sun was shining through the window, where the starry eyes of Clarice and Elithe had looked at him the night before. CHAPTER XXXIII. OUTSIDE THE PRISON. All that night lights were burning in the Ralston House, where the judge sat by his wife, who lay with her eyes closed and tears constantly running down her cheeks until it seemed as if she could not cry any more. “My boy, my boy! I must go to him,” she kept saying, and nothing but the assurance that she should do so could quiet her. “It will not harm her as much to go as it will to stay,” the doctor said when he came in the morning, and not long after Paul had breakfasted she was with him, sobbing in his arms, while he tried to comfort her, mastering his own grief for her sake, telling her it would all be right, and that he was very comfortable.