swell of you!"

"I didn't recognize you," said Pelle earnestly, suddenly recalled to the
world around him.

"Oh, all right--if you say so. It must be the fault of my nose. I got it
bashed in the evening after I'd buried mother. I was to give you her
love, by the way."

"Thank you!" said Pelle heartily. Old memories from the "Ark" filled his
mind and sent his blood coursing through his veins once more. "Is it
long since your mother died?" he asked sympathetically.

Ferdinand nodded. "It was a good thing, however," he said, "for now
there's no one I need go and have a bad conscience about. I'd made up my
mind that she deserved to have things comfortable in her old age, and I
was awfully careful; but all the same I was caught for a little robbery
and got eight months. That was just after you got in--but of course you
know that."

"No! How could I know it?"

"Well, I telegraphed it over to you. I was just opposite you, in Wing A,
and when I'd reckoned out your cell, I bespoke the whole line one
evening, and knocked a message through to you. But there was a
sanctimonious parson at the corner of your passage, one of those moral
folk--oh, you didn't even know that, then? Well, I'd always suspected
him of not passing my message on, though a chap like that's had an awful
lot of learning put into him. Then when I came out I said to myself that
there must be an end to all this, for mother'd taken it very much to