A year or two afterwards, (for I am not writing of a fictitious character,) this man's frauds were discovered. They were larger and more uniformly successful than any that had ever been perpetrated in the States, but there was about them a subtle, dogged daring that did not belong to Yarrow's character, and shrewd people who had known them began to talk of this shadow of a woman who went about with him,--a quadroon, they said,--and hinted strongly that it was she who had been the vital power of the partnership, and Yarrow but the well-chosen tool. There are no means of knowing the truth of the conjecture, for Yarrow escaped: she followed him, but is dead, so their secret is safe. Fraud, however, was but one half of his story. Soule gave like a prince,--secretly, with a woman-like, anxious helpfulness, a passionate eagerness, as if the pain or want of a human being were insufferable to him. In this he was alone: the woman had no share in it. She was as cold, impervious to the suffering of others as nothing but a snake or a selfish woman can be: whatever muddy human feeling did ooze from her brain was for this man only. And yet, when we think of it, she was, as they guessed, a quadroon: maybe, under the low, waxy-skinned forehead that Yarrow's fingers were patting that night there might have been a revengeful consciousness of the wrongs of her race that justified to her the harm she did. It is likely: the coarsest negroes argue in that way. God help them! At any rate, we shall come closest to Christ's rule of justice in trying to find a sore heart behind the vicious fingers of the woman. While the two stood in the pleasant light of the warm room waiting for him, Stephen Yarrow came towards the house across the fields. It was his shadow that his wife and Jem saw crossing Shag's Hill. He was a free man now,--by virtue of his nickname, "quiet Stevy," in part. It startled him as much as the jailer, when his release was sent in a year before the time, "in consideration of his uniform good conduct." The truth was, that M. Soule took an interest in the poor wretch, and had said a few words in his favor to the Governor at a dinner-party the other evening, so the release was signed the next day. Soule had called to see the man when he came to Pittsburg, and spent an hour or two in his cell. The next morning he was free to go, but he had stayed a week longer, making a pair of red morocco shoes for the jailer's little girl,--idling over them: when they were done, tying them on, himself, with a wonderful bow-knot, and looking anxiously in her clean Dutch face to see if she were pleased. "Kiss the gentleman, Meg," growled Ben. "Where's yer manners?"