When I did open my eyes Jem was sitting at the end of the bed, dying to tell me the news.
"Jack! you have waked, haven't you?
I see your eyes.

Don't shut 'em again.

What _do_ you think?
_Mrs.Wood's husband has come home!_" I never knew the ins and outs of the story very exactly.

At the time that what did become generally known was fresh in people's minds Jem and I were not by way of being admitted to "grown-up" conversations; and though Mrs.Wood's husband and I became intimate friends, I neither wished nor dared to ask him more about his past than he chose to tell, for I knew enough to know that it must be a most intolerable pain to recall it.
What we had all heard of the story was this.

Mr.Wood had been a head clerk in a house of business.