Was there no help?  Had the true God no messenger?  The winter-wind blowing through the window filled with fine frost wet his face, lifted the smothering off his lungs.  His eyes grew clear, as his full sense returned after a while:  seeing only at first, it so happened, the fire in its square frame; and thinking only of that, as the mind always drowsily absorbs the nearest trifle after a spasm of pain.  A bed of pale red coals now, furred over with white and pearl-colored ashes.  It was a long time since he had seen any open fire,—­years, he believed.  Where was it that there had been a fire just like that, with the ashes like moss over the heat,—­and on a night in winter, too, the wind rattling the panes?  Where was it?  While Soule stood waiting for his answer, his mind was drifting back, like that of a man in his dotage, through its dull, muddy thoughts, after that one silly memory.  He struck on it at last.  A year or two after he was married.  In the bedroom.  Martha was sitting by the fire, with the old yellow dog beside her:  she was trying to ride the baby on his neck,—­he was the clumsiest brute!  He came in and stopped to see the fun; he noticed the fire then, how cozy and warm it all was:  outside it was hailing, a gust shaking the house.  He had been doing a bit of carpentering,—­he did like to go back to the old trade!  This was a wicker chair for the baby,—­he had made it in the stable for a surprise:  the girl always liked surprises and such nonsense.  He put it down with a flourish, and he remembered how she laughed, and Ready growled, and how he and she both got on their knees to seat the youngster in, and tie him with his bandanna handkerchief.  So silly that all was!  When they were on the floor there, and had Master Jem fastened in, be remembered how she suddenly turned, and put her arms about his neck, as shyly as when they were first married, and kissed him.  “Only God knows how good you are to me, Stephen,” she said.  There were tears in her eyes.—­Yarrow passed his hand over his forehead.  Did ever a thought come into your mind like a fresh, clean air into a stove-heated, foul room? or like the first hearty, living call of Greatheart through the dungeons of Giant Despair?

“You do not answer me, Stephen?” said his brother.  “You will go with me?”

Yarrow’s head was more erect, his eyes less glazed.

“It may be.  The chance for me’s over in the world, I think.  I may as well serve you.  And yet”—­

“What?”

“Give me time to think.  I want out-of-doors.  It’s close here.  I’ll meet you in the morning.”

Soule caught his wife’s uneasy glance.

“What is this, Stephen?”

“Nothing,” looking dully out into the night.

“Then”—­

“There’s some you said were dead,”—­as if no one were speaking, with the same dull look.  “Or lost:  I think they’re not dead.  If there might be a chance yet!  If I could but see Martha and the little chaps, it would save me, John Yarrow, no matter what they’d learned to think of me.  They’re mine,—­my little chaps.  She said the boys should never know.  She said that of her own free will.”