bee-master before I got to the holy and humble men of heart.

I slept long then, and Mother would not let me be awakened. When I did
open my eyes Jem was sitting at the end of the bed, dying to tell me the
news.

"Jack! you have waked, haven't you? I see your eyes. Don't shut 'em
again. What _do_ you think? _Mrs. Wood's husband has come home!_"

I never knew the ins and outs of the story very exactly. At the time
that what did become generally known was fresh in people's minds Jem and
I were not by way of being admitted to "grown-up" conversations; and
though Mrs. Wood's husband and I became intimate friends, I neither
wished nor dared to ask him more about his past than he chose to tell,
for I knew enough to know that it must be a most intolerable pain to
recall it.

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