who killed the man. You have guessed, and I take the penalty. Suppose
I'm innocent--how will you feel when the truth comes out? You've known
me more or less these twenty years, and you've said, with evidently no
more knowledge than I've got, that I did this horrible thing. I don't
know but that one of you did it. But you are safe, and I take my ten
years!"

He turned from them, and, as he did so, he saw a woman looking at him
from a corner of the court-room, with a strange, wild expression. At the
moment he saw no more than an excited, bewildered face, but afterwards
this face came and went before him, flashing in and out of dark places in
a kind of mockery.

As he went from the court-room another woman made her way to him in spite
of the guards. It was the Little Chemist's wife, who, years before, had
been his father's housekeeper, who knew him when his eyes first opened on
the world.

"My poor Blaze! my poor Blaze!" she said, clasping his manacled hands.

In prison he refused to see all visitors, even Medallion, the Little
Chemist's wife, and the good Father Fabre. Letters, too, he refused to
accept and read. He had no contact, wished no contact with the outer
world, but lived his hard, lonely life by himself, silent, studious--
for now books were a pleasure to him. He had entered his prison a wild,
excitable, dissipated youth, and he had become a mature brooding man.
Five years had done the work of twenty.

The face of the woman who looked at him so strangely in the court-room
haunted him so that at last it became a part of his real life, lived