A blur swam before Christopher's eyes, and he saw in fancy the old soldier waiting for him on the bench beside the damask rose-bush. "And the others--and Maria Wyndham?" he asked, swallowing the lump in his throat. Jim reached out and laid his hand on the broad stripes across the other's shoulder. "She was with Mr. Tucker when he said that," he replied; "they are always together now; and she added; Tell him we shall wait together till he comes." The tears which had blinded Christopher's eyes fell down upon his clasped hands. "My God! Let me live to go back!" he cried out in his weakness. >From this time the element of hope entered into his life, and like its shadow there came the brooding fear that he should not live to see the year of his release. With his declining health he had been given lighter work in the prison factory, but the small tasks seemed to him heavier than the large ones he remembered. There was no disease, the physician in the hospital assured him; it was only his unusual form of homesickness feeding upon his weakened frame. Let him return once more to the outdoor life and the fresh air of the tobacco fields and within six months his old physical hardihood would revive. It was noticeable at this time that the quiet tolerance which had grown upon him in his convalescence drew to him the sympathy which he had at first repulsed. The interest awakened in the beginning by some rare force of attraction in his mere bodily presence became now, when he had fallen away to what seemed the shadow of himself, a friendly and almost affectionate curiosity concerning his earlier history. With this there grew slowly a rough companionship between him and the men among whom he lived, and he found presently to his surprise that there was hardly one of them but had some soft spot in his character--some particular virtue which was still alive. The knowledge of good and evil thrust upon him in these months was not without effect in developing a certain largeness of outlook upon humanity--a kind of generous philosophy which remained with him afterward in the form of a peculiar mellowness of temperament. The autumn of his third year was already closing when, being sent for one morning from the office of the superintendent, he went in to find Cynthia awaiting him with his pardon in her hand. "I've come for you, Christopher," she said, weeping at sight of his wasted figure. "The whole county has been working to get you out, and you are free at last." "Free at last?" he repeated mechanically, and was conscious of a disappointment in the fact that he experienced no elation with the words. What was this freedom, that had meant so much to him a month ago? "Somebody in Europe wrote back to Maria," she added, while her dry sobs rattled in her bosom, "that the boy had confessed it to a priest who made him write it home. Oh, Christopher! Christopher! I can't understand!"