From the time that Charlton began to pettifog with his conscience, he began to lose peace of mind.  His self-respect was impaired, and he became impatient, and chafed under his restraint.  As the trial drew on, he was more than ever filled with questionings in regard to the course he should pursue.  For conscience is like a pertinacious attorney.  When a false decision is rendered, he is forever badgering the court with a bill of exceptions, with proposals to set aside, with motions for new trials, with applications for writs of appeal, with threats of a Higher Court, and even with contemptuous mutterings about impeachment.  If Isa had not written to him, Albert might have regained his moral aplomb in some other way than he did—­he might not.  For human sympathy is Christ’s own means of regenerating the earth.  If you can not counsel, if you can not preach, if you can not get your timid lips to speak one word that will rebuke a man’s sin, you can at least show the fellowship of your heart with his.  There is a great moral tonic in human brotherhood.  Worried, desperate, feeling forsaken of God and man, it is not strange that Charlton should shut his teeth together and defy his scruples.  He would use any key he could to get out into the sunlight again.  He quoted all those old, half-true, half-false adages about the lawlessness of necessity and so on.  Then, weary of fencing with himself, he wished for strength to stand at peace again, as when he turned his back on the temptations of his rescuers in Metropolisville.  But he had grown weak and nervous from confinement—­prisons do not strengthen the moral power—­and he had moreover given way to dreaming about liberty until he was like a homesick child, who aggravates his impatience by dwelling much on the delightfulness of the meeting with old friends, and by counting the slow-moving days that intervene.

But there came, just the day before the trial, a letter with the post-mark “Metropolisville” on it.  That post-mark always excited a curious feeling in him.  He remembered with what boyish pride he had taken possession of his office, and how he delighted to stamp the post-mark on the letters.  The address of this letter was not in his mother’s undecided penmanship—­it was Isa Marlay’s straightforward and yet graceful writing, and the very sight of it gave him comfort.  The letter was simply a news letter, a vicarious letter from Isabel because Mrs. Plausaby did not feel well enough to write; this is what Isa said it was, and what she believed it to be, but Charlton knew that Isa’s own friendly heart had planned it.  And though it ran on about this and that unimportant matter of village intelligence, yet were its commonplace sentences about commonplace affairs like a fountain in the desert to the thirsty soul of the prisoner.  I have read with fascination in an absurdly curious book that people of a very sensitive fiber can take a letter, the contents and writer of which are unknown, and by pressing it for