What we had all heard of the story was this.  Mr. Wood had been a head clerk in a house of business.  A great forgery was committed against his employers, and he was accused.  He was tried, condemned, and sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude, which, in those days, meant transportation abroad.  For some little time the jury had not been unanimous.  One man doubted the prisoner’s guilt—­the man we afterwards knew as the old miser of Walnut-tree Farm.  But he was over-persuaded at last, and Mr. Wood was convicted and sentenced.  He had spent ten years of his penal servitude in Bermuda when a man lying in Maidstone Jail under sentence of death for murder, confessed (amongst other crimes of which he disburdened his conscience) that it was he, and not the man who had been condemned, who had committed the forgery.  Investigation confirmed the truth of this statement, and Mr. Wood was “pardoned” and brought home.

He had just come.  He was the tramp.

In this life the old miser never knew that his first judgment had been the just one, but the doubt which seems always to have haunted him—­whether he had not helped to condemn the innocent—­was the reason of his bequest to the convict’s wife, and explained much of the mysterious wording of the will.

It was a tragic tale, and gave a terrible interest to the gaunt, white-haired, shattered-looking man who was the hero of it.  It had one point of special awe for me, and I used to watch him in church and think of it, till I am ashamed to say that I forgot even when to stand up and sit down.  He had served ten years of his sentence.  Ten years!  Ten times three hundred and sixty-five days!  All the days of the years of my life.  The weight of that undeserved punishment had fallen on him the year that I was born, and all that long, long time of home with Mother and Father and Jem—­all the haymaking summers and snowballing winters—­whilst Jem and I had never been away from home, and had had so much fun, and nothing very horrid that I could call to mind except the mumps—­he had been an exile working in chains.  I remember rousing up with a start from the realization of this one Sunday to find myself still standing in the middle of the Litany.  My mother was behaving too well herself to find me out, and though Jem was giggling he dared not move, because he was kneeling next my father, whose back was turned to me.  I knelt down, and started to hear the parson say—­“show Thy pity upon all prisoners and captives!” And then I knew what it is to wish when it is too late.  For I did so wish I had really prayed for prisoners and captives every Sunday, because then I should have prayed for that poor man nearly all the long time he had been so miserable; for we began to go to church very early, and one learns to pray easier and sooner than one learns anything else.