"They call me names," she said in a low voice.
"They? Who? And what names?"
"The other girls, and the mistress too, and the women. They said that my father's wicked, and that I am wicked too. They say that he is to be hanged."
The child suddenly burst out crying; her sobs, loud and unrestrained, fell painfully on Hubert's ear.
"I went to the prison to see him, but they would not let me; and then I came back here."
She sobbed for a minute or two longer, and then became quiet as suddenly as she had broken into tears, rubbing her eyes with one hand, and peering furtively at Hubert between the black fingers.
"They were wrong," Hubert said at length. "Your father is not dead; he is not to be hanged at all." He paused before he spoke again. "He is in prison; he will be in prison for the rest of his life—a life sentence!"
He spoke rather to himself than to the child. Never had he realised so fully as at that moment what prison actually meant. To be shut up, away from friends, away from home, away from the sweet wild woods, the country air, the summer sun, to labor all day long at some heavy monotonous task, such as breaks the spirit and the heart of man with its relentless uniformity of toil—to wear the prison garb, to be known by a number, as one dead to the ordinary life of men, leaving at the prison gates that name which would be henceforth only a badge of disgrace to all who bore it in the outer world—these aspects of Andrew Westwood's sad case flashed in a moment across Hubert Lepel's mind with a thrill of intolerable pain. What could he do? Rise up and offer to bear that terrible punishment himself? It could not be—for Florence's sake, he told himself, it could not be. And yet—yet——Would that at the very beginning he had told the truth, and stood where Andrew Westwood stood, so that the ruffian and the poacher might not have to bear a doom that separated him for ever from his only child!
"Do you mean," said Jenny Westwood slowly, "that father will never come out of prison any more?"
"Perhaps—after many years—he may come out."