Oakley glanced at his letters. One he saw was from General Cornish. It proved to be a brief note, scribbled in pencil on the back of a telegram blank. The general would arrive in Antioch that night on the late train. He wished Oakley to meet him.

The other letter was in an unfamiliar hand. Oakley opened it. Like the first, it was brief and to the point, but he did not at once grasp its meaning. This is what he read:

“DEAR Sir,—I enclose two newspaper clippings which fully explain themselves. Your father is much interested in knowing your whereabouts. I have not furnished him with any definite information on this point, as I have not felt at liberty to do so. However, I was able to tell him I believed you were doing well. Should you desire to write him, I will gladly undertake to see that any communication you may send care of this office will reach him.

“Very sincerely yours,

“Ezra Hart.”

It was like a bolt from a clear sky. He drew a deep, quick breath. Then he took up the newspaper clippings. One was a florid column-and-a-half account of a fire in the hospital ward of the Massachusetts State prison, and dealt particularly with the heroism of Roger Oakley, a life prisoner, in leading a rescue. The other clipping, merely a paragraph, was of more recent date. It announced that Roger Oakley had been pardoned.

Oakley had scarcely thought of his father in years. The man and his concerns—his crime and his tragic atonement—had passed completely out of his life, but now he was free, if he chose, to enter it again. There was such suddenness in the thought that he turned sick on the moment; a great wave of self-pity enveloped him, the recollection of his struggles and his shame—the bitter, helpless shame of a child—returned. He felt only resentment towards this man whose crime had blasted his youth, robbing him of every ordinary advantage, and clearly the end was not yet.

True, by degrees, he had grown away from the memory of it all. He had long since freed himself of the fear that his secret might be discovered. With success, he had even acquired a certain complacency. Without knowing his history, the good or the bad of it, his world had accepted him for what he was really worth. He was neither cowardly nor selfish. It was not alone the memory of his own hardships that embittered him and turned his heart against his father. His mother's face, with its hunted, fugitive look, rose up before him in protest. He recalled their wanderings in search of some place where their story was not known and where they could begin life anew, their return to Burton, and then her death.

For years it had been like a dream, and now he saw only the slouching figure of the old convict, which seemed to menace him, and remembered only the evil consequent upon his crime.

Next he fell to wondering what sort of a man this Roger Oakley was who had seemed so curiously remote, who had been as a shadow in his way preceding the presence, and suddenly he found his heart softening towards him. It was infinitely pathetic to the young man, with his abundant strength and splendid energy; this imprisonment that had endured for almost a quarter of a century. He fancied his father as broken and friendless, as dazed and confused by his unexpected freedom, with his place in the world forever lost. After all, he could not sit in judgment, or avenge.