"I am glad you're in luck this time,--for you are. You don't know who is coming to take the charge,--come, I mean, for they are all in, and settled. That's Montier, the little girl's father. He is a drummer, and a little of everything else. It's his horn that you hear sometimes. And you know Elizabeth, who was always so kind about the flowers. His wife, too, she's a pretty woman, and kind as kind can be." "What have they come here for?" asked the prisoner, amazed. "I'll tell you," said Laval, more generous than he had designed to be; but he knew how he should wish, when the sea rolled between him and Foray, that he had spoken every comfortable word in his knowledge to this man; he knew it by his recent experiences of remorse in reference to his buried wife, and was wise enough to profit by the knowledge;--"I'll tell you. It's on your account. They were afraid somebody that didn't know how long you have been here, and how much you have suffered, would get the place; so they all came together and asked for it. They had a pretty little house up nigh the barracks, but they gave it up to come here. You'll see Montier to-night. For when I go back to your room with you, then I'm going off to--to"----he hesitated, for foremost among his instructions was this, that he should remain silent about his purpose of returning home; he was not to go as a messenger for the prisoner across the ocean to their native land----"to my business," he said. "If you'll be kind to him, you will make something by it. I thought I would tell you,--so, when you saw a strange face in your room, you would know what it meant without asking." "I thank you," said the prisoner; and to the jailer it now seemed as if the figure of the man beside him grew in height and strength,--as if he trod the ground less feebly and listlessly while he spoke these words. A divine consolation must have strengthened him even then, or he could never have added with such emphasis, "Wherever you go, take this my assurance with you,--you have not been cruel or careless. You have done as well as you could. I thank you for it." "You don't ask me where I'm going," said the jailer, after a silence that seemed but brief to him,--such a deal of argument he had dispatched, so many difficulties he had overcome in those few moments, whose like, for mental activity and conclusiveness, he had never seen before, and never would see again. "I shall be asked if I have told you. But--where did you come from? Do not tell me your name. But whom did you leave behind you that you would care most should know you are alive and in good hands?"