tried with him,—­you remember?—­she’s only got three years.  ’Complice.  But she’s a woman, you know.  He’s been quiet ever since I put on irons:  giv’ up, I suppose.  Looks white, sick-lookin’.  It acts different on ’em, bein’ sentenced.  Most of ’em gets reckless, devilish-like.  Some prays awful, and sings them vile songs of the mills, all in a breath.  That woman, now, she’s desper’t’.  Been beggin’ to see Hugh, as she calls him, for three days.  I’m a-goin’ to let her in.  She don’t go with him.  Here she is in this next cell.  I’m a-goin’ now to let her in.”

He let her in.  Wolfe did not see her.  She crept into a corner of the cell, and stood watching him.  He was scratching the iron bars of the window with a piece of tin which he had picked up, with an idle, uncertain, vacant stare, just as a child or idiot would do.

“Tryin’ to get out, old boy?” laughed Haley.  “Them irons will need a crowbar beside your tin, before you can open ’em.”

Wolfe laughed, too, in a senseless way.

“I think I’ll get out,” he said.

“I believe his brain’s touched,” said Haley, when he came out.

The puddler scraped away with the tin for half an hour.  Still Deborah did not speak.  At last she ventured nearer, and touched his arm.

“Blood?” she said, looking at some spots on his coat with a shudder.

He looked up at her.  “Why, Deb!” he said, smiling,—­such a bright, boyish smile, that it went to poor Deborah’s heart directly, and she sobbed and cried out loud.

“Oh, Hugh, lad!  Hugh! dunnot look at me, when it wur my fault!  To think I brought hur to it!  And I loved hur so!  Oh, lad, I dud!”

The confession, even in this wretch, came with the woman’s blush through the sharp cry.

He did not seem to hear her,—­scraping away diligently at the bars with the bit of tin.

Was he going mad?  She peered closely into his face.  Something she saw there made her draw suddenly back,—­something which Haley had not seen, that lay beneath the pinched, vacant look it had caught since the trial, or the curious gray shadow that rested on it.  That gray shadow,—­yes, she knew what that meant.  She had often seen it creeping over women’s faces for months, who died at last of slow hunger or consumption.  That meant death, distant, lingering:  but this—­Whatever it was the woman saw, or thought she saw, used as she was to crime and misery, seemed to make her sick with a new horror.  Forgetting her fear of him, she caught his shoulders, and looked keenly, steadily, into his eyes.

“Hugh!” she cried, in a desperate whisper,—­“oh, boy, not that! for God’s sake, not that!”

The vacant laugh went off his face, and he answered her in a muttered word or two that drove her away.  Yet the words were kindly enough.  Sitting there on his pallet, she cried silently a hopeless sort of tears, but did not speak again.  The man looked up furtively at her now and then.  Whatever his own trouble was, her distress vexed him with a momentary sting.