The minister held up a warning hand.

An immense yearning pity for Lydia had taken possession of him; but for the man who had thus risen from a dishonorable grave to blight her girlhood he felt not a whit.

“You’d better keep quiet,” he said sternly.  “You’d far better go away and leave her to live her life alone.”

“You’d like that; wouldn’t you?” said Bolton dryly.

He leaned forward and stared the young man in the eyes.

“But she wouldn’t have it that way.  Do you know that girl of mine wouldn’t hear of it.  She expects to make it up to me....  Imagine making up eighteen years of hell with a few pet names, a soft bed and—­”

“Stop!” cried Wesley Elliot, with a gesture of loathing.  “I can’t listen to you.”

“But you’ll marry her—­eh?”

Bolton’s voice again dropped into a whining monotone.  He even smiled deprecatingly.

“You’ll excuse my ranting a bit, sir.  It’s natural after what I’ve gone through.  You’ve never been in a prison, maybe.  And you don’t know what it’s like to shake the bars of a cell at midnight and howl out of sheer madness to be off and away—­somewhere, anywhere!”

He leaned forward and touched the minister on the knee.

“And that brings me back to my idea in coming to see you.  I’m a level-headed man, still—­quite cool and collected, as you see—­and I’ve been thinking the situation over.”

He drew his brows together and stared hard at the minister.

“I’ve a proposition to make to you—­as man to man.  Can’t talk reason to a woman; there’s no reason in a woman’s make-up—­just sentiment and affection and imagination:  an impossible combination, when there are hard realities to face....  I see you don’t agree with me; but never mind that; just hear what I have to say.”

But he appeared in no haste to go on, for all the eagerness of his eyes and those pallid, restless hands.  The minister got quickly to his feet.  The situation was momentarily becoming intolerable; he must have time to think it over, he told himself, and determine his own relations to this new and unwelcome parishioner.

“I’m very sorry, sir,” he began; “but—­”

“None of that,” growled Bolton.  “Sit down, young man, and listen to what I have to say to you.  We may not have another chance like this.”

His assumption of a common interest between them was most distasteful; but for all that the minister resumed his chair.

“Now, as I’ve told you, my daughter appears unwilling to allow me out of her sight.  She tries to cover her watchfulness under a pretense of solicitude for my health.  I’m not well, of course; was knocked down and beaten about the head by one of those devils in the prison—­ Can’t call them men:  no decent man would choose to earn his living that way.  But cosseting and coddling in a warm house will never restore me.  I want freedom—­nothing less.  I must be out and away when the mood seizes me night or day.  Her affection stifles me at times....  You can’t understand that, of course; you think I’m ungrateful, no doubt; and that I ought—­”