‘Oh! Don’t be too sure of that,’ cried Barnaby, with a strange pleasure in the belief that she was self- deceived, and in his own sagacity. ‘They have marked me from the first. I heard them say so to each other when they brought me to this place last night; and I believe them. Don’t you cry for me. They said that I was bold, and so I am, and so I will be. You may think that I am silly, but I can die as well as another.—I have done no harm, have I?’ he added quickly.

‘None before Heaven,’ she answered.

‘Why then,’ said Barnaby, ‘let them do their worst. You told me once—you—when I asked you what death meant, that it was nothing to be feared, if we did no harm—Aha! mother, you thought I had forgotten that!’

His merry laugh and playful manner smote her to the heart. She drew him closer to her, and besought him to talk to her in whispers and to be very quiet, for it was getting dark, and their time was short, and she would soon have to leave him for the night.

‘You will come to-morrow?’ said Barnaby.

Yes. And every day. And they would never part again.

He joyfully replied that this was well, and what he wished, and what he had felt quite certain she would tell him; and then he asked her where she had been so long, and why she had not come to see him when he had been a great soldier, and ran through the wild schemes he had had for their being rich and living prosperously, and with some faint notion in his mind that she was sad and he had made her so, tried to console and comfort her, and talked of their former life and his old sports and freedom: little dreaming that every word he uttered only increased her sorrow, and that her tears fell faster at the freshened recollection of their lost tranquillity.

‘Mother,’ said Barnaby, as they heard the man approaching to close the cells for the night,’ when I spoke to you just now about my father you cried “Hush!” and turned away your head. Why did you do so? Tell me why, in a word. You thought he was dead. You are not sorry that he is alive and has come back to us. Where is he? Here?’

‘Do not ask any one where he is, or speak about him,’ she made answer.

‘Why not?’ said Barnaby. ‘Because he is a stern man, and talks roughly? Well! I don’t like him, or want to be with him by myself; but why not speak about him?’

‘Because I am sorry that he is alive; sorry that he has come back; and sorry that he and you have ever met. Because, dear Barnaby, the endeavour of my life has been to keep you two asunder.’

‘Father and son asunder! Why?’

‘He has,’ she whispered in his ear, ‘he has shed blood. The time has come when you must know it. He has shed the blood of one who loved him well, and trusted him, and never did him wrong in word or deed.’

Barnaby recoiled in horror, and glancing at his stained wrist for an instant, wrapped it, shuddering, in his dress.

‘But,’ she added hastily as the key turned in the lock, ‘although we shun him, he is your father, dearest, and I am his wretched wife. They seek his life, and he will lose it. It must not be by our means; nay, if we could win him back to penitence, we should be bound to love him yet. Do not seem to know him, except as one who fled with you from the jail, and if they question you about him, do not answer them. God be with you through the night, dear boy! God be with you!’