“He bore it like a soldier, and that he became heart and liver from the moment.  But he put something to the account of the grey-faced man and locked it up in his breast.

“He come across him again years afterwards in India, and told him very politely that he hadn’t forgotten him, and didn’t intend to.  But he was anigh losin’ sight of him there for ever and a day, for the creature took cholera, or what looked like it, and rubbed shoulders with death and the devil before he pulled through.  And he come across him again over here, and that was the last of him, as you shall see presently.

“Once, after I knew the Major (he were Captain then), I was a-brushin’ his coat, and he stood a long while before the glass.  Then he twisted upon me, with a smile on his mouth, and says he,—­

“’The dog was right, Johnson:  this isn’t the face of a poet.  I was a presumtious ass, and born to cast up figgers with a pen behind my ear.’

“‘Captain,’ I says, ’if you was skinned, you’d look like any other man without his.  The quality of a soul isn’t expressed by a coat.’

“‘Well,’ he answers, ’my soul’s pretty clean-swept, I think, save for one Bluebeard chamber in it that’s been kep’ locked ever so many years.  It’s nice and dirty by this time, I expect,’ he says.  Then the grin comes on his mouth again.  ‘I’ll open it some day,’ he says, ’and look.  There’s something in it about comparing me to a dancing dervish, with the wind in my petticuts.  Perhaps I’ll get the chance to set somebody else dancing by-and-by.’

“He did, and took it, and the Bluebeard chamber come to be opened in this very jail.

“It was when the system was lying fallow, so to speak, and the prison was deserted.  Nobody was there but him and me and the echoes from the empty courts.  The contract for restoration hadn’t been signed, and for months, and more than a year, we lay idle, nothing bein’ done.

“Near the beginnin’ of this period, one day comes, for the third time of the Major’s seein’ him, the grey-faced man.  ‘Let bygones be bygones,’ he says.  ’I was a good friend to you, though you didn’t know it; and now, I expect, you’re in the way to thank me.’

“‘I am,’ says the Major.

“‘Of course,’ he answers.  ’Where would be your fame and reputation as one of the leadin’ prison reformers of the day if you had kep’ on in that riming nonsense?’

“‘Have you come for my thanks?’ says the Governor.

“‘I’ve come,’ says the grey-faced man, ’to examine and report upon your system.’

“‘For your paper?’

“’Possibly; but to satisfy myself of its efficacy, in the first instance.’

“‘You aren’t commissioned, then?’

“‘No; I come on my own responsibility.’

“‘Without consultation with any one?’

“‘Absolutely without.  I haven’t even a wife to advise me,’ he says, with a yellow grin.  What once passed for cholera had set the bile on his skin like paint, and he had caught a manner of coughing behind his hand like a toast-master.