breath.  Society had taken the man like a root torn out of native unctuous soil, kept it in a damp cellar, hid out the breath and light.  If after a while it withered away, whose fault was it?  If there were no hand now to plant it again, do you look for it to grow rotten, or not?  One would have said Soule was a root that had been planted in fat, loamy ground, to look at him.  There was a healthy, liberal, lazy life for you!  Yet the winter sky looked gray and dumb when he passed the window, and the fire-light broke fiercest against his bluff figure going to and fro.  No matter; something there that would have warmed your heart to him:  something genial, careless, big-natured, from the loose red hair to the indolent, portly stride.  “Who knows?  A comfortable, true-hearted, merry clergyman,—­a jolly farmer, with open house, and a bit of good racing-stock in the stable,—­if bigotry in his boyhood, and this woman, had not crossed him.  They had crossed him:  there was not an atom of unpolluted nature left:  you saw the taint in every syllable he spoke.  Fresh and malignant to-night, when this tempted soul hung in the balance.

“We’re letting the matter slip too long.  Something must be decided upon.  Stephen!” nervously, “wake up!  You have forgotten our subject, I think.”

“No,” the bald head raised out of the coat-collar in which it had sunk.  “Go on.”

Soule looked at him perplexed a moment.  Was he dulled, or had he learned in those years to shut in looks and thoughts closer prisoners than himself?

“It is a mere question of time,” he said, a little composed.  “Frazier is an agent:  shall this money accrue to me or to his employers?  I have risked all on it.  I must have it at any cost.”

“At any cost?”

“At any,” boldly.  “Is it any easier for me to talk of that chance than you, Stephen?”

“No, John.  Your hands are clean,” with an exhausted look.  “I know that.  You had a kind Irish heart.  What money you made with one hand you flung away with the other.”

Soule blushed like a woman.

“No matter,” beating some dust off his boot.  “But for Frazier,—­I’ve talked that over with Judith, and—­I don’t value human life as you do:  it may Lave been my residence in the South.  It matters little how a man dies, so he lives right.  This Frazier, if he dies to defend his package, would do a nobler deed than in any of his dime-scraping days.  For me, my part is not robbery.  The paper is neither specie nor a draft.”

His tongue swung fluently now, for it had convinced himself.

“There is but a night left to decide.  What will you do, Stephen?”

He put his hand on the green coat with its gaudy buttons, and leaned against his brother as they used to go arms over shoulders to school.  Soule’s big throat was full of tears; he had never felt so full of sorrowful pity as in this the foulest purpose of his life.  Unselfish it seemed to him.  O God! what a hard life Stephen’s had been!  This would cure him:  two or three sea-voyages, a winter in Florence, would freshen him a little, maybe,—­but not much.