"Where is he now?"
"Heaven knows. He was here, but he is gone; for when the Republic fell I was imprisoned, and two days before that he was liberated."
"Silence!" shouted the warders, awakening suddenly and hearing voices.
Jason's eyes had begun to fill, and down his rugged cheeks the big drops were rolling one by one. After that he checked the impulse to speak of the nurse. The wife of his yoke-fellow must be an evil woman. The prisoner-priest must have been taken in by her. For once the warders must have been right.
And late that night, while Jason was dressing the wounded hand of Michael Sunlocks with wool torn from his own sheepskin jerkin, he said, with his eyes down,
"I scarce thought there was anything in common between us two. You're gentleman, and I'm only a rough fellow. You have been brought up tenderly, and I have been kicked about the world since I was a lad in my poor mother's home, God rest her! But my life has been like yours in one thing."
"What's that?" said Michael Sunlocks.
"That another man has wrecked it," said Jason. "I never had but one glint of sunshine in my life, and that man wiped it out forever. It was a woman, and she was all the world to me. But she was proud and I was poor. And he was rich, and he came between us. He had everything, and the world was at his feet. I had nothing but that woman's love, and he took it from me. It was too cruel, and I could not bear it—God knows I could not."
"Wait," cried Michael Sunlocks. "Is that why you are here! Did you——you did not——no——"
"No, I know what you mean; but I did not kill him. No, no, I have never seen him. I could never meet with him, try how I would."