largely at the window where he looked out at the pigeons on the roof of
the hospital.

"She was sorry for me," he said many a time to himself. He was shaken
with misery often, so that he rocked to and fro as he sat on his bed,
and a warder heard him cry out even in the last days of his imprisonment:

"O God, canst Thou do everything but speak!" And again: "That hour--the
memory of that hour, in exchange for my ruined life!"

One day the gaoler came to him and said: "Monsieur Turgeon, you are free.
The Governor has cut off five years from your sentence."

Then he was told that people were waiting without--Medallion, the Little
Chemist and his wife, and others more important. But he would not go to
meet them, and he stepped into the open world alone at dawn the next
morning, and looked out upon a still sleeping village. Suddenly there
stood before him a woman, who had watched by the prison gates all night;
and she put out her hand in entreaty, and said with a breaking voice:
"You are free at last!"

He remembered her--the woman who had looked at him so anxiously and
sorrowfully in the court-room. "Why did you come to meet me?" he asked.

"I was sorry for you."

"But that is no reason."

"I once committed a crime," she whispered, with shrinking bitterness.