Then with the closing of the second winter his superb physical strength snapped suddenly like a cord that has stood too tight a strain, and for weeks he lingered between life and death in the hospital, into which he was carried while yet unconscious. With his returning health, when the abatement of the fever left him strangely shaken and the unearthly pallor still clung to his face and hands, he awoke for the first time to a knowledge that his illness had altered for the period of his convalescence, at least the vision through which he had grown to regard the world. A change had come to him, in that mysterious borderland so near the grave, and the bare places in his soul had burst suddenly into fulfilment. Sitting one Sunday morning in the open court of the prison, with his thin white hands hanging between his knees and his head, cropped now of its thick, fair hair, raised to the sunshine, it seemed to him that, like Tucker on the old bench, he had learned at last how to be happy. The warm sun in his face, the blue sky straight overhead, the spouting fountain from which a sparrow drank, produced in him a recognition, wholly passionless, of the abundant physical beauty of the earth--of a beauty in the blue sky and in the clear sunshine falling upon the prison court. A month ago he had wondered almost hopefully if his was to be one of those pathetic sunken graves, marked for so brief a time by wooden headboards the graves of the men who had died within the walls--and now there pulsed through him, sitting there alone, a quiet satisfaction in the thought that he might still breathe the air and look into men's faces and see the blue sky overhead. The sky in itself! That was enough to fill one's memory to overflowing, Tucker had said. A tall, lean convict, newly released from the hospital, crossed the court at a stumbling pace and stood for a moment at his side. "I reckon you're hankerin', he remarked. "I was sent down here from the mountains, an' I hanker terrible for the sight of the old Humpback Knob." "And I'd like to see a level sweep--hardly a hill, just a clean stretch for the wind to blow over the tobacco." "You're from the tobaccy belt, then, ain't you? What are you here for?" "Killing a man. And you?" "Killin' two." He limped off at his feeble step, and Christopher rubbed his hands in the warm sunshine and wondered how it would feel to bask on one of the old logs by the roadside. That afternoon Jim Weatherby came to see him, bringing the news that Lila's baby had come and that she had named it Christopher. "It's the living image of you, she says," he added, smiling; "but I confess I can't quite see it. The funny part is, you know, that Cynthia is just as crazy about it as Lila is, and she looks ten years younger since the little chap came." "And Uncle Tucker?" "His old wounds trouble him, but he sent you word he was waiting to go till you came back again."