The Redemption of John Churchill John Churchill walked slowly , not as a man walks who is tired , or content to saunter for the pleasure of it , but as one in no haste to reach his destination through dread of it . The day was well on to late afternoon in mid-spring , and the world was abloom . Before him and behind him wound a road that ran like a red ribbon through fields of lush clovery green . The orchards scattered along it were white and fragrant , giving of their incense to a merry south-west wind ; fence-corner nooks were purple with patches of violets or golden-green with the curly heads of young ferns . The roadside was sprinkled over with the gold dust of dandelions and the pale stars of wild strawberry blossoms . It seemed a day through which a man should walk lightly and blithely , looking the world and his fellows frankly in the face , and opening his heart to let the springtime in . But John Churchill walked laggingly , with bent head . When he met other wayfarers or was passed by them , he did not lift his face , but only glanced up under his eyebrows with a furtive look that was replaced by a sort of shamed relief when they had passed on without recognizing him . Some of them he knew for friends of the old time . Ten years had not changed them as he had been changed . They had spent those ten years in freedom and good repute , under God 's blue sky , in His glad air and sunshine . He , John Churchill , had spent them behind the walls of a prison . His close-clipped hair was grey ; his figure , encased in an ill-fitting suit of coarse cloth , was stooped and shrunken ; his face was deeply lined ; yet he was not an old man in years . He was only forty ; he was thirty when he had been convicted of embezzling the bank funds for purposes of speculation and had been sent to prison , leaving behind a wife and father who were broken-hearted and a sister whose pride had suffered more than her heart . He had never seen them since , but he knew what had happened in his absence . His wife had died two months later , leaving behind her a baby boy ; his father had died within the year . He had killed them ; he , John Churchill , who loved them , had killed them as surely as though his hand had struck them down in cold blood . His sister had taken the baby , his little son whom he had never seen , but for whom he had prepared such a birthright of dishonour . She had never forgiven her brother and she never wrote to him . He knew that she would have brought the boy up either in ignorance of his father 's crime or in utter detestation of it .
When he came back to the world after his imprisonment , there was not a single friendly hand XXXXX clasp his and help him struggle up again .
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