degrees, in the pauses of his quick and laboured
breathing, he was heard to say:

"What is this!"

With the tears streaming down her face, she
put her two hands to her lips, and kissed them
to him; then clasped them on her breast, as if
she laid his ruined head there.

"You are not the gaoler's daughter?"

She sighed "No."

"Who are you?"

Not yet trusting the tones of her voice, she
sat down on the bench beside him. He recoiled,
but she laid her hand upon his arm. A strange
thrill struck him when she did so, and visibly
passed over his frame; he laid the knife down
softly, as he sat staring at her.

Her golden hair, which she wore in long curls,
had been hurriedly pushed aside, and fell down
over her neck. Advancing his hand by little
and little, he took it up, and looked at it. In
the midst of the action he went astray, and,
with another deep sigh, fell to work at his
shoemaking.

But, not for long. Releasing his arm, she
laid her hand upon his shoulder. After looking
doubtfully at it, two or three times, as if to be
sure that it was really there, he laid down his
work, put his hand to his neck, and took off a
blackened string with a scrap of folded rag
attached to it. He opened this, carefully, on his
knee, and it contained a very little quantity of
hair: not more than one or two long golden
hairs, which he had, in some old day, wound off
upon his finger.

He took her hair into his hand again, and
looked closely at it. "It is the same. How
can it be! When was it! How was it!"

As the concentrating expression returned to
his forehead, he seemed to become conscious that
it was in hers too. He turned her full to the
light, and looked at her.

"She had laid her head upon my shoulder,
that night when I was summoned out—she had
a fear of my going, though I had none—and
when I was brought to the North Tower they
found these upon my sleeve. 'You will leave me
them? They can never help me to escape in
the body, though they may in the spirit.' Those
were the words I said. I remember them very
well."

He formed this speech with his lips many
times before he could utter it. But when he
did find spoken words for it, they came to him
coherently, though slowly.

"How was this?—Was it you?"

Once more, the two spectators started, as he
turned upon her with a frightful suddenness.
But, she sat perfectly still in his grasp, and only
said, in a low voice, "I entreat you, good
gentlemen, do not come near us, do not speak, do
not move!"

"Hark!" he exclaimed. "Whose voice was
that?"

His hands released her as he uttered this
cry, and went up to his white hair, which they
tore in a frenzy. It died out, as everything but
his shoemaking did die out of him, and he re-
folded his little packet and tried to secure it in
his breast; but, he still looked at her, and
gloomily shook his head.

"No, no, no; you are too young, too blooming.
It can't be. See what the prisoner is.
These are not the hands she knew, this is not
the face she knew, this is not a voice she ever
heard. No, no. She was—and He was—before
the slow years of the North Tower—ages ago.
What is your name, my gentle angel?"

Hailing his softened tone and manner, his
daughter fell upon her knees before him, with
her appealing hands upon his breast.

"O, sir, at another time you shall know my
name, and who my mother was, and who my
father, and how I never knew their hard, hard
history. But I cannot tell you at this time, and
I cannot tell you here. All that I may tell you,
here and now, is, that I pray to you to touch
me and to bless me. Kiss me, kiss me! O my
dear, my dear!"

His cold white head mingled with her radiant
hair, which warmed and lighted it as though it
were the light of Freedom shining on him.

"If you hear in my voice—I don't know that
it is so, but I hope it is—if you hear in my
voice any resemblance to a voice that once was
sweet music in your ears, weep for it, weep for
it! If you touch, in touching my hair, anything
that recals a beloved head that lay in your breast
when you were young and free, weep for it,
weep for it! If, when I hint to you of a Home
there is before us, where I will be true to you
with all my duty and with all my faithful
service, I bring back the remembrance of a Home
long desolate, while your poor heart pined away,
weep for it, weep for it!"

She held him closer round the neck, and
rocked him on her breast like a child.

"If, when I tell you, dearest dear, that your
agony is over, and that I have come here to
take you from it, and that we go to England to
be at peace and at rest, I cause you to think of
your useful life laid waste, and of our native
France so wicked to you, weep for it, weep for
it! And if, when I shall tell you of my name,
and of my father who is living, and of my mother
who is dead, you learn that I have to kneel to
my honoured father, and implore his pardon for
having never for his sake striven all day and lain
awake and wept all night, because the love of
my poor mother hid his torture from me, weep
for it, weep for it! Weep for her, then, and for
me! Good gentlemen, thank God! I feel his
sacred tears upon my face, and his sobs strike
against my heart. O, see! Thank God for
us, thank God!"

He had sunk in her arms, with his face dropped
on her breast: a sight so touching, yet so terrible
in the tremendous wrong and suffering which had
gone before it, that the two beholders covered
their faces.

When the quiet of the garret had been long
undisturbed, and his heaving breast and shaken
form had long yielded to the calm that must
follow all storms—emblem to humanity, of the
rest and silence into which the storm called