had understood her position in life as compared with that of other
girls. She must never marry. She must never fall in love, even. The
inflexible Puritan code of her uncle's wife had found ready
acceptance in Lydia's nature. If not an active participant in her
father's crime, she still felt herself in a measure responsible for
it. He had determined to grow rich and powerful for her sake. More
than once, in the empty rambling talk which he poured forth in a
turgid stream during their infrequent meetings, he had told her so,
with extravagant phrase and gesture. And so, at last, she had come to
share his punishment in a hundred secret, unconfessed ways. She ate
scant food, slept on the hardest of beds, labored unceasingly, with
the great, impossible purpose of some day making things right: of
restoring the money they--she no longer said _he_--had stolen; of
building again the waste places desolated by the fire of his ambition
for her. There had followed that other purpose, growing ever stronger
with the years, and deepening with the deepening stream of her
womanhood: her love, her vast, unavailing pity for the broken and
aging man, who would some day be free. She came at length to the time
when she saw clearly that he would never leave the prison alive,
unless in some way she could contrive to keep open the clogging
springs of hope and desire. She began deliberately and with purpose
to call back memories of the past: the house in which he had lived,
the gardens and orchards in which he once had taken pride, his
ambitious projects for village improvement.

"You shall have it all back, father!" she promised him, with
passionate resolve. "And it will only be a little while to wait,
now."

Thus encouraged, the prisoner's horizon widened, day by day. He