“Eh?  What will you do, old fellow?” striking his shoulder.  “This is the last night.”

“I know that.  I have been waiting for it all my life.”

He put his red handkerchief up to his mouth to conceal the face, as if its meaning were growing too plain.  Soule looked at him fixedly a moment, then, taking him by the button, began tapping off his sentences on his breast.

“I’ll state the case.  I’ll be plain.  Stephen, you want food; you want clothes; you”—­

“Is that all I want?” facing him.

The woman started, as she saw his face fully, and his look, for the first time.  A quiet blue eye, unutterably kind and sad:  a slow, compelling face, that would look on his life barely, day after day, year after year, never drowsing over its sore or pain until he had wrung its full meaning out to the last dregs.

“All you want?  Clothing? food?” stammered Soule,—­something in the face having stopped his garrulous breath.  “I did not say that, Stephen.”

The wind struck sharper on the rattling panes; the yellow and brown heats grew deeper.  One saw how it was then.  No beggar turned from God so empty-handed as this man to-day.  His place in the world slipped:  his chance gone:  sick, sinking; his brain mad for knowledge:  his hands stretched out for work:  no man to give it to him:  whatever God he had lost to him:  the thief’s smell, he thought, on every breath he drew, every rag of clothes he wore.  Hundreds of convicts leave our prison-doors with souls as hungry and near death as this.

“I have lost something—­since I went in there,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.  “I do not think it will ever come back.”

“No?”

Soule put his big hand to his face mechanically.

“Don’t say that, boy!  I know—­The world has gone on, it has left you behind—­You”—­

He choked,—­could not go on:  he would have put half the strength and life in himself into Yarrow’s lank little body that moment, if he could.  There was a something else lost, different from all these, of which they both thought, but they did not speak of it.  The convict looked out into the night.  Beyond the square patch of window and that near dark, how full the world was of happy homes getting ready for Christmas! children and happy wives!  Soule understood.

“I don’t say I can bring you back what you have lost, Stephen.  I offer you the best I can.  You’re not an old man,—­barely thirty:  you must have years to acquire fresh bone and muscle.  Set your brain to work, meanwhile.  Give it a chance.”

“It never had one,” said the convict, with a queer, faint smile.

“Hillo! that looks like old times!” brightening up.  “No, it never had.  Do you think I forget our alley-house with its three rooms? the carpentering by day, and the arithmetic by night? the sweltering, sultry Sunday mornings in church, and the afternoons sniffling over the catechism among the rain-butts in the back-yard?  Do you remember the preachers, the travelling agents, that put up with us? how they snarled at other churches, and helped themselves out of the shop, as if to be a man of God implied a mean beggar?  I don’t say my father was a hypocrite when he made you a colporteur, and so one of them; but”—­