“Poor Jim! so he got away; I am glad of that. What a wonderful rider he was! But I suppose he will be caught some day. Oh, I do so wish I could say anything that would make you repent of what you have done, and try and do better by and by. Papa says you have a long life before you most likely, and might do so much with it yet. You will try, for my sake; won’t you now?”

“I’ll do what I can, miss,” I said; “and if I ever see Jim again I’ll tell him of your kindness.”

“Thank you, and good-bye,” she said, and she held out her hand again and took mine. I walked away, but I couldn’t help holding my head higher, and feeling a different man, somehow.

I ain’t much of a religious chap, wasn’t then, and I am farther off it now than ever, but I’ve heard a power of the Bible and all that read in my time; and when the parson read out next Sunday about Jesus Christ dying for men, and wanting to have their souls saved, I felt as if I could have a show of understanding it better than I ever did before. If I’d been a Catholic, like Aileen and Mother, I should have settled what the Virgin Mary was like when she was alive, and never said a prayer to her without thinking of Miss Falkland.

While I was dying one week and getting over it another, and going through all the misery every fellow has in his first year of gaol, Starlight was just his old self all the time. He took it quite easy, never gave anyone trouble, and there wasn’t a soul in the place that wouldn’t have done anything for him. The visiting magistrate thought his a most interesting case, and believed in his heart that he had been the means of turning him from the error of his ways—he and the chaplain between them, anyhow. He even helped him to be allowed to be kept a little separate from the other prisoners (lest they should contaminate him!) , and in lots of ways made his life a bit easier to him.

It was reported about that it was not the first time that he had been in a gaol. That he’d “done time,” as they call it, in another colony. He might or he might not. He never said. And he wasn’t the man, with all his soft ways, you’d like to ask about such a thing.