Farwell's excitement showed in his eyes and voice and wiped out the weariness of his face.
"You mean that, Master Farwell? You are not trying to comfort me?"
"No; I am comforting myself!"
Then, forgetful of the need for sleep, he went on rapidly:
"Out where you are going, Priscilla, there is a—a woman I love; she once loved me. This must seem queer to you who have only known me as—as I now seem. I will seem different to you when you have wakened up—seen other kinds of men and women."
"Is she young—pretty?"
The senseless words escaped Priscilla's lips because quivering interest and a strange embarrassment held her thought.
"I—I do not know—how she is now. She was pretty. Good God! how pretty she was, and young, and kind, too. It was the kindness that mattered most. You see, she thinks me dead; it was best so. I—I had to be dead for a while and then I meant to go to her myself. But—something happened. I was obliged to stay on here, and she might not have understood. I'd like——" Farwell paused and looked pleadingly at the white girl-face across the rude table, where the fragments of food still lay: "I'd like you to go and see her. Boswell could take you. He's done everything for her, God bless him! I'd—I'd like to have you tell her gently, kindly, that I am alive. You might say it so as to spare her shock; you might, better than any one else!"
The longing in the man's eyes was almost more than Priscilla could endure. Crude as she was, wrong and sinful as the man near her may at one time have been, she knew intuitively that the love for that woman in the States had been his consuming and uplifting passion. If he had sinned for her, he had also died for her, and now he pleaded for resurrection in her life.
"I will do anything in all the world for you, Master Farwell; anything!"