“Thank you, Tom,” he said, when the latter rose to go. “You can never know all you have been to me these last few weeks, and I know there is nothing you would not do to save me if you could.”
“Nothing, so help me God, nothing!” Tom answered with a choking voice and holding fast to Paul’s hand as if loath to let it go.
The jailer found them standing there together when he brought in the lamp, Tom the whiter and more agitated of the two, as he released Paul’s hand and said good-bye.
“That’s a good fellow. I almost believe he’d die for you,” the jailer said, as Tom went out.
Paul did not reply. He was anxious to be alone to read Elithe’s note. It was very different from Clarice’s and the difference struck him forcibly. Elithe’s thought was all for him. What she was suffering was for him. There was no self in it, and he involuntarily pressed the note to his lips and whispered, “Poor little Elithe, I am so sorry for her.”
He had kissed Clarice’s letter many times, but not exactly as he kissed Elithe’s. The first had brought him only pain and disappointment. The last had brought him comfort in some way, he hardly knew how, and he put it with Clarice’s under his pillow, and dreamed that night of the waltz in the moonlight which Elithe had wished might go on forever. Clarice’s star and Elithe’s were out of sight, but other stars looked in upon him with a kind of benediction us as he slept more peacefully and quietly than he had done since he became a prisoner.
CHAPTER XXXV.
THE FIRST DAY OF THE TRIAL.
All of Sunday Mr. and Mrs. Ralston spent with Paul, who was calmer than either of his parents.
“I think my bones must have contracted some of Miss Hansford’s prophetic nature,” he said to his mother, “for I feel it in them that something will turn up in my favor,—the right man appear, perhaps, at the last and own up.”
His mother tried to smile, but her heart was heavy with fear of what the result might be. Her husband had employed the very best talent in Boston, while the prosecution was rather lame in experience at least. But it had an unbroken chain of evidence, beginning with the quarrel at the hotel and ending with the revolver and the story Elithe would tell. Popularity and a good name could scarcely stem that tide, and when at parting she brushed his brown hair from his forehead, she thought with a shudder of the shears which would soon cut that soft hair short and of the prison garb which would disfigure her son’s manly form, if he escaped——. There was a gurgling sound in her throat when she got so far, and the tight clasp around Paul’s neck, as she whispered “Good-bye, my boy, good-bye,” was like a mother’s farewell to her dead child. She would see him on the morrow, it was true, first for a few moments in the jail, and then in the Court House, a prisoner arraigned on trial for his life, and she would almost rather he had died a baby in her arms than see him there.