The apology was needless, for Jake Baintree seemed complimented to be permitted to make himself useful, and brought out the demijohn with much glad alacrity. Marcella marveled in self-reproachful dismay that she should have such strange thoughts, but as Jake Baintree poured the fluid into a glass she noted how sinewy and thin his hands were, and white as the doctor’s own,—so long had they been idle and listless in jail; and she wondered with which of them he had killed Samuel Keale,—with both, perchance,—and if handcuffs had been put on those long, bony wrists while he languished in prison. And when he offered her a glass, she shuddered and drew back, and shook her head without a word. Mrs. Strobe also declined to join in the potations. “Sperits air all well enough fur men,” she observed,—“they hev got so little sense ennyhow, it don’t matter ef they gits foolisher ’n nat’ral wunst in a while; but ef the Lord’ll spare my reason, I’ll ondertake ter holp him.” As the stranger sat drinking the athletic apple-jack so graphically described by Mrs. Strobe, he seemed less reluctant, less doubtful, than before. He said almost nothing, however, leaving the conversation to Jake Baintree, watching him with interest, and in the intervals of silence meditatively eying the smouldering fire. He had the air of holding himself in abeyance, and quietly awaiting developments. He seemed to indorse all that Baintree said, who talked eagerly, and was by no means averse to giving an account of his friend. “I war powerful glad Marcelly met up with we-uns, Mis’ Strobe,” he said, as he sat on the opposite side of the fire, his elbows on his knees, his hat pushed back on his sleek black hair, his eyes seeming hardly so crafty and bright since they betokened such kindliness, that Marcella was reminded anew of his gratitude to her father for the logical stand as to his innocence which the constable had taken after his acquittal. “I never war so glad ez I hed this hyar doctor-man visitin’ me.” The stranger always had that covert smile, barely to be detected, on his face, when he was thus designated; but he raised the glass to his lips, and, except by Marcella, it was not noticed. “He physicked me whenst I war sick in jail, an’ I knowed he war a powerful survigrous man ter hev around whenst folks air ailin’.”