"That's he," the keeper whispered to Alice, who had fallen behind Hugh
and his mother. "That's he, just turning this way--the one to the
right."
Alice nodded in token that she understood, and then stood watching while
he came up. Mrs. Worthington and Hugh were watching too, not him
particularly, for they did not even know which was Sullivan, but stood
waiting for the whole long line advancing slowly toward them, their eyes
cast down with conscious shame, as if they shrank from being seen. One
of them, however, was wholly unabashed. He thought it probable the
keeper would point him out; he knew they used to do so when he first
came there, but he did not care; he rather liked the notoriety, and when
he saw that Alice seemed waiting for him, he fixed his keen eyes on her,
starting at the sight of so much beauty, end never even glancing at the
other visitors, at Mrs. Worthington and Hugh, who, a little apart from
each other, saw him at the same moment, both turning cold and faint, the
one with surprise, and the other with a horrid, terrible fear.
It needed but a glance to assure Hugh that he stood in the presence of
the man who with strangely winning powers had tempted him to sin--the
villain who had planned poor Adah's marriage--Monroe, her guardian,
whose sudden disappearance had been so mysterious. Hugh never knew how
he controlled himself from leaping into that walk and compelling the
bold wretch to tell if he knew aught of the base deserter, Willie
Hastings' father. He did, indeed, take one forward step while his fist
clinched involuntarily, but the next moment fell powerless at his side
as a low wail of pain reached his ear and he turned in time to save his
fainting mother from falling to the floor.
She, too, had seen the ropemaker, glancing at him twice ere sure she saw
aright, and then, as if a corpse buried years ago had arisen to her
view, the blood curdled about her heart which after one mighty throe lay
heavy and still as lead. He was not dead; that paragraph in the paper
telling her so was false; he did not die, such as he could not die; he
was alive--alive--a convict within those prison walls; a living,
breathing man with that same look she remembered so well, shuddering as
she remembered it, 'Lina's father and her own husband!
"It was the heat, or the smell, or the parting with Adah, or something,"
she said, when she came back to consciousness, eagerly scanning Hugh's
face to see if he knew too, and then glancing timidly around as if in
quest of the phantom which had so affected her.