Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/96

 the end of the long, black tunnel glimmered the pinpoint of light on the other side, and as the years dragged by and the dark place was traversed, the pin-point grew and brightened with the Heaven-given sunlight of freedom—for them. For him, it was all blackness and there was no guiding, inspiriting light, and he must move in the darkness, stumbling, feeling with his hands his way along against the wall—for life.

Twice, at two o'clock in the morning—neither clock nor timepiece told him the hour—he had risen up in his cot and the face of Harold Merton had been before him. It had swept him with an all-engulfing passion that racked him to his soul, and his finger-tips had bled as they dug into the stone wall of his cell and the sweat had poured from his forehead. Twice this happened before he conquered it—and he conquered it only then with that other face, her face—the face of Mrs. Merton.

Gradually Varge found himself, in his own strong, big way—chiselling with soul-wrung bloody sweat from the fearful flint of his surroundings the laws by which he could best govern himself.

And from him first, as a dangerous, fatal thing, he put all thought of Harold Merton; and quiet control and patience came to lessen the misery that rebellion could but nourish. He forced himself to see the life around him, the conditions, the environment, not with the eyes of one who was part of it, who wore a convict's stripes, not with the eyes of guilt—but with the eyes of innocence. It was a place of punishment—and it was just. But, too, as one who understood too well the hungry eyes that stared from out of strained white faces, as one