"You comfort me," he said. "Although I may appear to you careless and indifferent, you know well enough it is impossible that I can be so; you know that I must be tearing my heart out in the terrible position in which I have been forced by ruthless circumstance. Make no mistake I am myself greatly to blame for what has occurred. It has been folioed upon me by my sense of honor and right and truth. Why, life once spread itself before me with a prospect so glad, so beautiful, that it almost awed me! But, after all, if a man bears within him the assurance that he is doing what he is in honor bound to do, surely that should be something! There--you see what you have forced from me. Yes, I did look eagerly forward when I heard that the jury could not agree. At least there was one man there who believed me to be innocent, and without the slightest knowledge of him I blessed him for the belief."
He gazed round with the air of a man who was fearful that every movement he made was watched and observed by enemies, and then he said, in a low tone,
"I need a friend."
I replied, instantly, following the tone that he had used, "I am here; I will be your friend."
"It is a simple service I require," he said; "I have a letter about me which I wish to be posted. What it contains concerns no one whom you know. It is my affair and mine only, and rather than make it another man's I would be burned at the stake, though we don't live in such barbarous times;" and then he added, with a sigh, "But they are barbarous enough."
"I will post the letter for you," I said. He looked me in the face, a long, searching, wistful look, and as he gazed, I saw in his eyes a nobility of spirit which drew me as close to him in sympathy and admiration as I had sever been drawn in my life to any man.
"Dare I trust you?" he said, still preserving his low tone. "But if not you, whom can I trust?"
"You may trust me," I said; "I will post the letter for you faithfully."
"Not close to the prison," he said. "Not in this district. Put it into a pillar-box at some distance from this spot."
"I will do as you desire."