1895. 



TJIE AMERICAN BEE-KEEPER. 



193 



ctijoi' iueiLiUers or lijepisrty leit rhe two, 

 and this very money bad been found in 

 Louis' pocket. Tbere was only Louis' 

 word tbat tbey bad played cards again. 

 Anger? Possibly. Louis could not re- 

 member, tbon.s:b he knew they had quar- 

 reled. The judge himself, charging the 

 jury, said that he never before saw a 

 prisoner so frank and outwardly honest, 

 but warned them that they must not 

 lose sight of the crime itself, the taking 

 of a human life, whereby a woman was 

 made a widow and a child fatherless. 



And so with the few remarks the 

 judge sentenced the young Seigneur to 

 ten years in prison, and then himself, 

 shaken and pale, left the courtroom hur- 

 riedly, for Louis Converse's father had 

 been his friend from boyhood. 



Louis took his sentence calmly, look- 

 ing the judge squarely in the eyes, and 

 ■when the judge stopped he bowed to 

 him, turned to the jury and said: "Gen- 

 tlemen, you have ruined my life. You 

 don't know, and I don't know, who 

 killed the man. You have guessed, and 

 I take the penalty. Suppose I'm inno- 

 cent. How will you feel when the truth 

 comes out? You've known me more ar 

 less these 20 years, and you've said with 

 no more knowledge than I've got that I 

 did this miserable thing. I don't know 

 but that one of you did it, but you are 

 safe, and I take my tea years. " 



He turned from them, and as he did 

 so he saw a woman looking at him from 

 a corner of the courtroom with a 

 strange, wild expression. At the mo- 

 ment he saw no more than an excited, 

 bewildered face, but afterward this face 

 came and went before him, flashing in 

 and out of dark places in a mocking 

 sort of way. As he Tvent from the 

 courtroom another woman made her 

 way to him in spite of the guards. I's 

 was the little chemist's wife, who yean- 

 before had been his father's bousekeeper, 

 who had been present when he first 

 opened his eyes on the world. 



"My poor boy! My poor boy!" she 

 said, clasping his manacled hands. 



He kissed heron the cheek, without a 

 word, and hurried on into his prison, 

 and the good world was shut out. Ir 

 prison he refused to see all visitors, even 

 Medallion, the little chemist's wife, 

 and the good Father Fabro. Letters, 

 too, he refused to accept and read. He 

 had no contact, wished, n.o contact, with 



the outer world, but" lived fiis Bard, 

 lonely life by himself, silent, brooding, 

 studious, for now books were to him a 

 pleasure. And he wrote, too, but never 

 to any soul outside the prison. This life 

 had nothing to do with the world from 

 which he came, and he meant that it 

 should not. 



So perfect a prisoner was he that the 

 warders prutected him from visitors, 

 and he was never but once or twice 

 stared at, and then he saw nothing, 

 heard nothing. He had entered his pris- 

 on a wild, tjvci table, dissipated youth, 

 and he had become a mature, quiet, 

 cold, broofl'ng man. Five years had 

 done the work of 20. He lived the life 

 of the prison, yet he was not a part of 

 it, nor yet was he a part of the world 

 without And the face of the woman 

 who looked at him so strangely in the 

 courtroom haunted him now and then, 

 so that at last it became a part of his 

 real life, which was lived largely at the 

 window, where he looked out at the 

 pigeons on the roof of the hospital. 



"She wasf^^orry for me, " he said many 

 a time to hinjself. He was sorry for 

 himself, and he was shaken with misery 

 often, so that ho rocked to and fro as he 

 sat on his bed, and a warder heard him 

 cry out even in the last days of his im- 

 prisonment, "O God, canst thou do 

 everything but speak?" And again, 

 "That hour, tne memory of that hour, 

 in exchange for my ruined life!" 



But there were times when he was 

 very quiet and calm, and he spent hours 

 in watching the ways of the pigeons, 

 and he was doing this one day when the 

 jailer came to him and said: "M. Con- 

 verse, you are free. The governor has 

 cut off five years from your sentence. " 



Then he was told that people were 

 waiting without — Medallion and the 

 little chemist and his wife and others 

 more important — but he would not go 

 to meet them, and he stepped into the 

 old world alone at dawn the next morn- 

 ing and looked out upon a still, sleep- 

 ing town. And there was no one stir- 

 ring in the place, but suddenly there 

 stood before him a woman, who had 

 watched by the prison gates all night, 

 and she put out a 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 anxiouslv and sor- 



