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Where was her graciously curved bosom? Ah! "Where are the snows of yester-year?" "Oh, Sir," she said at length, "I have come to you about my son whom you punished today." Kellson now for the first time remembered that the surname she had given him was the same as that of the prisoner whom he had so severely sentenced. He could now decipher the suggestion in the eyes, which had so puzzled him.
"Save him, save him from the flogging," she said hoarsely, "he is your son." Kellson sprang to his feet and looked down at the kneeling woman; his eyes stony with horror, and his face white and rigid. He knew in a flash that what she said was true. The face that the prisoner's reminded him of, and that he could not localise, was his own.
His wife was an extremely emotional person, who could be persuaded to do a thing, or leave it undone, as the case might be, by arguments based upon conventionalism or generosity, but never by those drawn from justice or reasonableness. Kellson had at first set himself the task of showing her the saving graces of reasonableness, but he soon gave the attempt up in disgust.
When she left, Kellson experienced a deep sense of relief; a whole year's freedom seemed endless at the beginning, but now two-thirds of the time had gone by swiftly, and in about four months she would be back. How he dreaded her return and the recommencement of the old discordant life.
Kellson blew the candle out and took a sip of the chloral mixture. It was so strong that it made him cough. He lit the candle and added more water. It then struck him that the room might smell close when the people entered it on the morrow, so he got up and opened the window wide. He then returned to bed, drank off the contents of the tumbler, and lay down.
But things would have come all right between them had there only been a child. Kellson had not been a successful man. At the beginning, his career promised well. Fifteen years previously he had been ahead of most men of his own term of service, but now others some of them considerably his juniors had forged past him.
She stood up, faltered a "Good night," and went out of the house with feeble steps. Kellson sat down in his chair and thought. His brain was quite calm, and his mind was clear, He heard the rumble of the waggon, and the voice of the boy shouting to the bullocks as he drove the team. He stood up, and mechanically seized his hat and stick. He wondered where the keys of the Office were kept.
Having a constitutional distaste for public functions of all kinds, outside the established official routine, Kellson had purposely left the inhabitants of the village and district in the dark as to the date of his intended arrival, so as to avoid the agonies of a public reception, involving an address and a reply, both couched in the irritating platitudinous phraseology deemed indispensable on such occasions.
It being Monday, there was a heavy roll of cases for trial, and when the one attorney and the two agents saw Kellson take the bench, they were much chagrined at having been done out of the pleasure of presenting the usual florid address. Of the criminal cases to be heard, only one was of any importance, namely that of a young coloured man charged with burglary. His name was John Erlank.
Kellson was, no doubt, in some respects a difficult man to live with, but he nevertheless would have made a reasonable, sympathetic woman moderately happy. His habit was to act reasonably according to his lights in all his daily relations, both official and domestic.
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