“They was wet, you know, and we had to dry ’em separate,” said the old man, “but you’ll find ’em right, I guess.”

Field flushed up when he saw one of the rolls:  it was tied with a string, and a bit of paper about it was marked in pencil, partly obliterated, “Long Fellow of Ti.”  He put that package into his pocket with the’ other things, and left the other roll of money on the table.

“You two people have done uncommonly neighborly by me,” he said.  “I should like to know your reason.”  “I guess most anybody’d done it, stranger,” answered Trapp.  “Like’s you’d be done by, you know, ef you’d ha’ been me, wouldn’t you?”

“No, I’ll be hanged if I would!” broke out Field.  “But look here, friends:  you think he threw me down.  He did not:  I jumped off myself.  He did not touch me.”

“Oh, God bless you!” cried the bowed old wife, her worn face turning radiant upon him and bright drops starting in the dull old eyes.  They were almost the first words he had heard her speak.  Though she had been very attentive to him all along, she had done it almost in silence and with an averted face.  Her voice was high and almost sweet.  Field talked on then, and told them several things at which they both fell to crying like children.  He took out one bill from the roll on the table and made the old man take the rest.  “I do not pretend that money can pay what I owe you,” he said, “but what I have you must let me give you for my own satisfaction.”

During the next few days, while he gathered his strength, our friend sat about the house in the sunny places and took a strong liking for the simple, kind old wife, and told her by degrees the story of his life and his friends.  In that wonderful air he rallied like magic.  He took longer and longer walks, keeping well out of sight of prying eyes, though the place was retired enough, for that.  Thursday morning of that week he borrowed some clothes of the farmer and made a bundle of his own.  He bade the old couple good-bye, not without regret on either side.  As the Wanita ploughed up the lake that day on her return trip, a man came down from the hurricane-deck into the cabin, sat by the table and took up a magazine lying there and turned it over.  He was dressed in coarse, ill-fitting, homespun clothes, and had a newly-healed scar on his forehead.  His upper lip was roughly shorn, and the rest of his face covered with a two or three weeks’ beard.  He was not an attractive-looking person, certainly, and yet the pretty girl sewing by the window, her face quite wan and worn-looking now, glanced at him many times in a flurried, nervous way; and when he was gone she went and took up the old magazine, opened it where a leaf was turned down, and read these lines of an old-fashioned ballad: 

  Oh, alone and alorn, as the night came down,
    Sir Reginald walked on the wet sea-sands;
  And all as he walked came Marianne,
    King’s daughter of all those lands.