"I have lost something--since I went in there," he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. "I do not think it will ever come back." "No?" Soule put his big hand to his face mechanically. "Don't say that, boy! I know--The world has gone on, it has left you behind--You"-- He choked,--could not go on: he would have put half the strength and life in himself into Yarrow's lank little body that moment, if he could. There was a something else lost, different from all these, of which they both thought, but they did not speak of it. The convict looked out into the night. Beyond the square patch of window and that near dark, how full the world was of happy homes getting ready for Christmas! children and happy wives! Soule understood. "I don't say I can bring you back what you have lost, Stephen. I offer you the best I can. You're not an old man,--barely thirty: you must have years to acquire fresh bone and muscle. Set your brain to work, meanwhile. Give it a chance." "It never had one," said the convict, with a queer, faint smile. "Hillo! that looks like old times!" brightening up. "No, it never had. Do you think I forget our alley-house with its three rooms? the carpentering by day, and the arithmetic by night? the sweltering, sultry Sunday mornings in church, and the afternoons sniffling over the catechism among the rain-butts in the back-yard? Do you remember the preachers, the travelling agents, that put up with us? how they snarled at other churches, and helped themselves out of the shop, as if to be a man of God implied a mean beggar? I don't say my father was a hypocrite when he made you a colporteur, and so one of them; but"-- He paused. Even in this frothy-brained fellow, his religion or his doubt lay deeper than all. His face grew dark. "I tell you, if there is one thing I loathe, it is the God and His day that were taught to me when I was a child: joyless, hard, cruel. Fire--humph!--and brimstone for all but a few hundred. I remember. Well, I don't know yet if there is any better," with a vague look. "A man shifts for himself in the next chance as well as now, I suppose. Did you believe what you preached, Stephen?" with an abrupt change. "God! how you used to writhe under it at first!" "They forced me into it," said Yarrow. "I was only a boy. You remember that I was only a boy,--just out of the shop. The more uneducated a man was in our church-pulpit then, the better. _I_ knew nothing, John," appealingly. "When I preached about foreordination and hell-fire, it was in coarse slang: I knew that. I used to think there might be a different God and books and another life farther out in the world, if I could only get at it. I never was strong, and they had forced me into it; and when you came to me to help you with your plan, I wanted to get out, and"-- "You did help me,"--chafing the limp fingers. "That was my first start, that Pesson note. I owe that to you, Stephen."