Lionel Dering was blessed with one of those equable dispositions which predispose their owner to look always at the sunny side of everything; and even now, in prison, and with such a terrible accusation hanging over him, no one ever saw him downhearted or in any way distressed. There was about him a serenity, a quiet cheerfulness, which nothing seemed able to disturb; and when in the company of others he was usually as gay and animated as if the four walls of his cell had been those of his own study at Park Newton. The ordeal was, in any case, a very trying one; but it would have been infinitely more so but for the sweet offices of love and friendship which he owed in one case to his wife, and in the other to his friend. Either Edith or Tom saw him every day. But when all his visitors had gone, and night and silence had settled down on the grim old prison--silence so profound that but for the recurring voice of a distant clock, as it counted the hours slowly and solemnly, he could have fancied himself the last man left alive in the world--then it was that he felt his situation the most. He had been so used to an active, outdoor life, that he could not now tire himself sufficiently to sleep well.

It was these hours of darkness, when the rest of the world was abed, and the long, long hours of daylight in the early summer mornings before it was yet awake, which tried him more than anything else. At such times, when he was tired of reading--and he had never before read so much in so short a space of time--he could do nothing but lie back on his pallet, with his arms curled under his head, and think. The mornings were balmy, soft, and bright. Through the cell-casement, which he could open at will, he could hear the merry twittering of innumerable sparrows. He could see the slow shadows sliding, inch by inch, down the gray stone walls of the prison yard, as the sun rose higher in the sky. Now and then the sweet west wind brought him faint wafts of fragrance from the hay-slopes just outside the prison gates. Sometimes he could hear the barking of a dog on some far far-off farm, or the dull lowing of cattle; sounds which reminded him that the great world, with its life, and hopes, and fears, lay close around him, though he himself might have no part therein. At such moments he often felt that he would give half of all he was possessed of for an hour\'s freedom outside those tomb-like walls--for one hour\'s blessed freedom, with Edith by his side, to wander at their own sweet will through lane and coppice and by river\'s brim, with the free air of heaven blowing around them, and nothing to bound their eyes but the dim horizon, lying like a purple ring on woods and meadows far away.

Little wonder that during these long, solitary hours a sense of depression, of melancholy even, would now and then take possession of him for a little while; that his mind was oppressed with vague forebodings of what that future, which was now drawing near with sure but unhasting footsteps, might possibly have in store for him. He had just won for himself the sweetest prize which this world had in its power to offer him, and his very soul shrank within him when he thought that he had won it only, perhaps, to lose it for ever in a few short weeks. Bitter, very bitter--despairing almost--grew his thoughts at such times; but he struggled bravely against them, and never let them master him for long. When the clock struck six, and the tramp of heavy feet was heard along the corridors, and the jingling of huge keys--when the warders were changed, and the little wicket in his cell door was opened and a cheerful voice said, "Good-morning, sir. Hope you have slept well," Lionel\'s cheery response would ring out, clear and full, "Good-morning, Jeavons. I\'ve had an excellent night, thank you." And Jeavons would go back to his mates and say, "Mr. Dering\'s just wonderful. Always the same. Never out o\' sorts."

Later on would come Hoskyns, and Edith, and Tom. It was impossible for Edith to visit the prison alone, and the lawyer would often make a pretence of having business with his client when he had none in reality, rather than withstand the piteous, pleading look which would spring to Edith\'s eyes the moment he told her that there would be no occasion for him to visit the gaol that day. While he lives Hoskyns will never forget those pretty pictures of the lover-husband and his bride, as they sat together, hand in hand, in the grim old cell, comforting each other, strengthening each other, and drawing pictures of the happy future in store for them; deceiving each other with a make-believe gaiety; and hiding, with desperate earnestness, the terrible dread which lay lurking, like a foul witch in a cavern, low down in the heart of each--that, for them, the coming months might bring, not sunshine, flowers, and the joys of mutual love, but life-long separation and the unspeakable darkness that broods beneath the awful wings of Death.

On these occasions, Hoskyns never neglected to provide himself with a newspaper, and, buried behind the huge broadsheet of "The Times," with spectacles poised on nose, he would go calmly on with his reading, leaving Lionel and Edith almost as much to themselves as though he had not been there. The sterling qualities of the old lawyer, and the thorough sincerity of his character, gradually forced themselves on the notice of Lionel and his wife, both of whom came, after a time, to regard him almost in the light of a second father, and to treat him with an affectionate familiarity which he was not slow to appreciate.

As Tom Bristow was turning the corner of Duxley High Street, one afternoon about three days after his arrival from London, he was met, face to face, by Squire Culpepper. The squire stopped and stared at Tom, but failed for the moment to recognize him.

"Good-morning, sir," said Tom, heartily. "Glad to see you looking so well."

"Why--eh?--surely I must know that face," said the squire. "It\'s young Tom Bristow, if I\'m not mistaken."

"You are not mistaken, sir," answered Tom.

"Then I\'m very glad to see you, Tom--very," said the squire, as he shook Tom warmly by the hand. "Your father was a man whom I liked and respected immensely. I can never forget his kindness and attention to my poor dear wife during her last illness--never. He did all that man could do to preserve her to me--but it was not to be. For your father\'s sake, Tom, you will always find Titus Culpepper stand your friend."

"It is very kind of you to say so, sir."

"Not at all--not at all. So you\'re back again at the old place, eh? Going to stop with us this time, I hope. You ought never to have left us, young sir, but have settled down quietly in your father\'s shoes. Vagabondizing\'s a bad thing for any young man."

"I quite agree with you, sir," said Tom, in a tone of assumed simplicity.

"Glad you\'ve come round to my way of thinking at last. Knew you would. Well, if I can do anything for you in the way of helping you to get a decent living, you may command me fully. Think over what I\'ve said, and come and dine with me at Pincote to-morrow at seven sharp."

"It would be worth something," said Tom to himself as he went on his way, "to know what the squire\'s opinion about me really is; to have a glimpse at the portrait of me in all its details which he has evolved from his own inner consciousness. Strange that in a little town like this, where everybody knows everybody else\'s business better than he knows his own, if a man venture to step out of the beaten track prescribed for him by custom and tradition, and is bold enough to strike out a path for himself, he is at once set down as being, of necessity, either a lunatic or a scapegrace--unless, indeed, his lunacy chance to win for him either a fortune or a name. And then how changed the tone!"

Next evening Tom found himself at Pincote. The squire introduced him in brief terms to his daughter, and then left the room for a few minutes, for which Tom did not thank him. "What can I say to Miss Culpepper that will be likely to interest her?" he asked himself. "Does she go in for private theatricals, or for ritualism and pet parsons? Does she believe in soup kitchens and visiting the poor, or would she rather talk about the new prima donna, and the last new poem?"

Miss Culpepper had sat down again at the piano, and was striking a few chords now and then, in an absent-minded way. She was by no means a pretty girl in the ordinary acceptation of the term. Her face was a good one, without being strikingly handsome. She had something of her father\'s shrewd, keen look, but with an underlying expression of goodness and kindliness, difficult to define, but unmistakably there. She had large blue-gray eyes and magnificent teeth. Her complexion, lily-clear during the winter months, was already freckled by the warm May sunshine, and would be more so before the summer was over. Finally, her hair was red--not auburn, but an unmistakable red.

But Tom Bristow had rather a weakness for red hair--not perhaps for the deep, dull, fiery red which we sometimes see. He accepted it, as the old Venetians accepted it--as one of the rarest types of beauty, as something far superior to your commonplace browns and blacks. And then he did not object to freckles--in moderation. He looked upon them as one of the signs of a sound country-bred constitution. As Jane Culpepper sat there by the piano, in the sunny May eventide, in her white dress, trimmed with pale green velvet, with her red hair coiled in great hands round her little head--with her frank smile, and her clear honest-looking eyes, she filled up in Tom\'s mind his ideal picture of a healthy, pure-minded English country girl, and it struck him that he could have made a very pleasant water-colour sketch of herself and her surroundings.

Jane spared him the trouble of finding a topic that would be likely to interest her by being the first to speak. "Do you find Duxley much changed since you were here last?" She asked.

"Very little changed indeed. These small country towns never do change, or only by such imperceptible degrees that one never notices the difference. But may I ask, Miss Culpepper, how you know that I am not a stranger to Duxley?"

"Oh, I have often heard papa speak of you, and wonder what had become of you."

"And heard him blame me, I doubt not, for running away from the friends of my youth, and the town of my birth."

"I cannot say that you are altogether wrong," answered Jane with a smile. "Papa is a little impulsive at times, as I dare say you know, and judges every one from his own peculiar standpoint."

"Which means, in my case, I suppose, that because I was born in Duxley, I ought to have earned my bread there, died there, and been buried there."

"Something of the kind, doubtless. Old-fashioned prejudices you would call them, Mr. Bristow."

"I dare say I should. But they are worthy of respect for all that."

"Is not that somewhat of a paradox?"

"Hardly so, I think. Men like Mr. Culpepper, with their conservatism, and their traditions of a past--which, it should not be forgotten, was not a past, but a present, when they were young people, and is, consequently, not so very antiquated--with their faith in old institutions, old modes of thought, old friendships, and--and old wine, are simply invaluable in this shifty, restless, out-of-breath era in which we live. They are like the roots of grass and tangle which bind together the sandhills on a windy shore. They conserve for us the essence of an experience which dates from years before we were born; which will sweeten our lives, if we know how to use it: as yonder pot-pourri of faded rose-leaves sweetens this room, and whispers to us that, in summers long ago, flowers as sweet bloomed and faded, as those which blossom for us to-day and will fade and leave us to-morrow."

"When you are as old as papa, Mr. Bristow," said Jane, with a laugh, "I believe you will be just as conservative and full of prejudices as he is."

"I hope so, I\'m sure," said Tom, earnestly. "Only, my prejudices will differ in some degree from his--as his would doubtless differ in degree from those o............