The colonel had thought so much about his old age that now he was near saying: "You know I haven't so very many years," but he held on to himself. "He's got to go alone," said Anne. "But he'll come back." "Yes," said Lydia, from the habit they had learned of heartening Farvie, "he'll come back." But she was hotly resolving that he should learn his duty and stay here. Let her get a word with him alone. "What I'm going to do out there I don't know," said Jeffrey. "But I am going to work, and I'm going to turn in enough to keep you as you ought to be. I want to stay here a little while first." The colonel was rejuvenated by delight. Lydia wondered how anybody could see that look on his face and not try to keep it there. "I've got," said Jeffrey, "to write a book." "Oh, my son," said the colonel, "that's better than I hoped. The newspapers have had it all, how you've changed the prison paper, and how you built up a scheme of prison government, and I said to myself, 'When he comes out, he'll write a book, and good will come of it, and then we shall see that, under Providence, my son went to prison that he might do that.'" He was uplifted with the wonder of it. The girls felt themselves carried along at an equal pace. This was it, they thought. It was a part of the providences that make life splendid. Jeffrey had been martyred that he might do a special work. "Oh, no," said he, plainly bored by the inference. "That's not it. I'm going to write the life of a fellow I know." "Who was he?" Anne asked, with a serious uplift of her brows. "A defaulter." "In the Federal Prison?" "Yes." VI He looked at them, quite unconscious of the turmoil he had wakened in them. Lydia was ready to sound the top note of revolt. Her thoughts were running a definite remonstrance: "Write the life of another man when you should be getting your evidence together and proving your own innocence and the injustice of the law?" Anne was quite ready to believe there must be a cogent reason for writing the life of his fellow criminal, but she wished it were not so. She, too, from long habit of thought, wanted Jeffrey to attend to his own life now he had a chance. The colonel, she knew, through waiting and hoping, had fallen into an attitude of mind as wistful and expectant as hers and Lydia's. The fighting qualities, it seemed, had been ground out of him. The fostering ones had grown disproportionately, and sometimes, she was sure, they made him ache, in a dull way, with ruth for everybody. "Did the man ask you to write his life?" he inquired. "No," said Jeffrey. "I asked him if I could. He agreed to it. Said I might use his name. He's no family to squirm under it." "You feel he was unjustly sentenced," the colonel concluded. "Oh, no. He doesn't either. He mighty well deserved what he got. Been better perhaps if he'd got more. What I had in mind was to tell how a man came to be a robber."