True, by degrees, he had grown away from the memory of it all. He had long since freed himself of the fear that his secret might be discovered. With success, he had even acquired a certain complacency. Without knowing his history, the good or the bad of it, his world had accepted him for what he was really worth. He was neither cowardly nor selfish. It was not alone the memory of his own hardships that embittered him and turned his heart against his father. His mother's face, with its hunted, fugitive look, rose up before him in protest. He recalled their wanderings in search of some place where their story was not known and where they could begin life anew, their return to Burton, and then her death. For years it had been like a dream, and now he saw only the slouching figure of the old convict, which seemed to menace him, and remembered only the evil consequent upon his crime. Next he fell to wondering what sort of a man this Roger Oakley was who had seemed so curiously remote, who had been as a shadow in his way preceding the presence, and suddenly he found his heart softening towards him. It was infinitely pathetic to the young man, with his abundant strength and splendid energy; this imprisonment that had endured for almost a quarter of a century. He fancied his father as broken and friendless, as dazed and confused by his unexpected freedom, with his place in the world forever lost. After all, he could not sit in judgment, or avenge. So far as he knew he had never seen his father but once. First there had been a hot, dusty journey by stage, then he had gone through a massive iron gate and down a narrow passage, where he had trotted by his mother's side, holding fast to her hand. All this came back in a jerky, disconnected fashion, with wide gaps and lapses he could not fill, but the impression made upon his mind by his father had been lasting and vivid. He still saw him as he was then, with the chalky prison pallor on his haggard face. A clumsily made man of tremendous bone and muscle, who had spoken with them through the bars of his cell-door, while his mother cried softly behind her shawl. The boy had thought of him as a man in a cage. He wondered who Ezra Hart was, for the name seemed familiar. At length he placed him. He was the lawyer who had defended his father. He was puzzled that Hart knew where he was; he had hoped the little New England village had lost all track of him, but the fact that Hart did know convinced him it would be quite useless to try to keep his whereabouts a secret from his father, even if he wished to. Since Hart knew, there must be others, also, who knew. He took up the newspaper clippings again. By an odd coincidence they had reached him on the very day the Governor of Massachusetts had set apart for his father's release. Outside, in the yards, on the drenched town, and in the sweating fields beyond, the warm spring rain fell and splashed.