Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/160

 to have been insensible to it, and he was glad that it was over; though, too, there had been compensation—a firm clasp of John Randall's hand, and another from Sheriff Marston.

Each day of the four, he, with a dozen others under guard, had been taken from the penitentiary in the morning and driven to Berley Falls to act as witnesses in the trials of Twisty and the Butcher, as ringleaders, together with their accomplices for the murder of Wenger. Contrary to expectation, but to his own relief, the proceedings had been concluded shortly before noon that day—Twisty and the Butcher receiving the full sentence of the law; and the rest, found guilty of manslaughter, being given an additional twenty years to the terms they were then serving.

And now, as he turned in at the driveway and swept the lawn and shrubbery with a rapid glance, a sense of disappointment came over him, slowing for the moment his step. He had hoped that she might be there; and he had half-promised himself the gladness that would come from the sound of her voice in cheery greeting, and the added sunshine from the smile of her lips and eyes—but she was nowhere in sight.

He kept on up the driveway, his eyes falling here and there, on this bed and that, on evidences of her work during his enforced absence. How dearly she loved her garden, the plants and flowers and trees and vines—and how like them, too, she was in her freshness and her purity, in her sweet, faultless beauty, in the delicate fragrance of innocence that she breathed about her!

Gradually his step quickened again. She was somewhere in the house, probably; and sometime before the