She had brought the children here to be near the penitentiary, but she had never been allowed to see him.  No letters came from him.  His brother, John Yarrow, sent hers to him.  There was some formula of admission, he said, which she did not understand.  The time was nearly up; in one year more he would be free.  Well, and then?  He had been in one of the ways that butted down on hell; how would he come back to her?  In all these years, silence.  Who would bring him back?  Who?  They were keen enough to put him in,—­but who would stay with him, to say, “You’ve slipped, boy, but stand up again”?  Who would hold out a kind hand at the gate, when he came out, with “Here’s a place, Yarrow.  Here’s home, and love, and God waiting; try another chance”?  Who would do that?  No wonder she looked out that night, thinking there was some work forgotten.

Martha sat there until dawn came, moving only to replenish the fire lest the children should take cold.  In all her life she never forgot that night.  Some furious instinct seemed at work within her, goading her to be up and doing.  What should she do?  Why should she disquiet herself?  Her husband was safe asleep in his cell.  Yet all night long she could not keep her soul back from crying to God to save him in his deadly peril, to bring him there at once to her, to the children.  When morning broke, cold and sweet-breathed, russet clouds, dyed with the latent crimson day, thronging up from behind the hills, she tried to thrust down all the pains of the night as moody fancies.  They did not go.  She bathed herself, woke the children, laughed and romped with them (for their year’s holiday should not be damped); but the cold, unsufferable weight within dragged her physically down.  Trifles without, too, beset her with vague fears.  Ready was gone; for years he had not left the house at night.  The children began to look with uneasy eyes at her face:  she would betray all.  She kept her fingers thrust in the breast of her wrapper to touch the case of the picture:  she could hold herself quiet so.  How cold and unmeaning the light was that day to her! and every tick of the clock seemed to beat straight on her brain.  So the morning crept by.  She grew so sure—­without reason—­that it was the last day of waiting, that, when the children went out to build their snow-man, she sat down on Jem’s chest, shivering and dizzy; when the snow cracked under a step outside, afraid to turn her head,—­thinking he would be standing in the door, with the old patient smile on his mouth, and his hand out.  But he did not come.

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