which in this lumbering country lie about everywhere, he rejoiced that Charlton had learned to appreciate the value of Christian peace, and he offered a silent prayer that Albert might one day obtain the same serenity as himself.  For nothing was further from the young minister’s mind than the thought that any of his good qualities were natural.  He considered himself a miracle of grace upon all sides.  As if natural qualities were not also of God’s grace!

CHAPTER XXXI.

MR. LURTON.

It was a warm Sunday in the early spring, one week after Mr. Lurton’s conversation with Charlton, that the latter sat in his cell feeling the spring he could not see.  His prison had never been so much a prison.  To perceive this balminess creeping through the narrow, high window—­a mere orifice through a thick wall—­and making itself feebly felt as it fell athwart the damp chilliness of the cell, to perceive thus faintly the breath of spring, and not to be able to see the pregnant tree-buds bursting with the coming greenness of the summer, and not to be able to catch the sound of the first twittering of the returning sparrows and the hopeful chattering of the swallows, made Albert feel indeed that he and life had parted.

Mr. Lurton’s three months as chaplain had expired, and there had come in his stead Mr. Canton, who wore a very stiff white neck-tie and a very straight-breasted long-tailed coat.  Nothing is so great a bar to human sympathies as a clerical dress, and Mr. Canton had diligently fixed a great gulf between himself and his fellow-men.  Charlton’s old, bitter aggressiveness, which had well-nigh died out under the sweet influences of Lurton’s peacefulness, came back now, and he mentally pronounced the new chaplain a clerical humbug and an ecclesiastical fop, and all such mild paradoxical epithets as he was capable of forming.  The hour of service was ended, and Charlton was in his cell again, standing under the high window, trying to absorb some of the influences of the balmy air that reached him in such niggardly quantities.  He was hungering for a sight of the woods, which he knew must be so vital at this season.  He had only the geraniums and the moss-rose that Isa, had sent, and they were worse than nothing, for they pined in this twilight of the cell, and seemed to him smitten, like himself, with a living death.  He almost stopped, his heart’s beating in his effort to hear the voices of the birds, and at last he caught the harsh cawing of the crows for a moment, and then that died away, and he could hear no sound but the voice of the clergyman in long clothes talking perfunctorily to O’Neill, the wife-murderer, in the next cell.  He knew that his turn would come next, and it did.  He listened in silence and with much impatience to such a moral lecture as seemed to Mr. Canton befitting a criminal.

Mr. Canton then handed him a letter, and seeing that it was addressed in the friendly hand of Lurton, he took it to the window and opened it, and read: